TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

So strange to think about how Vine could’ve won this and an American company could’ve been the leader here.

It got Kodak'd.

They really dropped the ball.

A reminder of how much of success is luck/timing.

And remember Quibi [1]? Short-form video in vertical format specifically for mobile devices? They didn't have every aspect nailed, but they were definitely trailblazers on that front.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi

Or YouTube. Short form animation was the largest draw of views in the early days before they chose to kill it and become a "serious platform"

I thought the kept incentivizing longer content so they could cram more ads into the videos. Hard to get some one to watch a 20 second ad for a 2 minute video, but if you can convince everyone to pad that thing up to 10 minutes you could stuff at least 2 ads in there.

Was that at all like TikTok? I thought it was professional creators, not community-sourced.

Quibi launched in April 2020. TikTok by this point would have 2 billion downloads [1]. It's difficult to assess they were trailblazers here. I might even say a component of their failure is free mobile video was widely accessible by this point.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241788/tiktok-app-downl...

Didn't have every aspect nailed? Definitely trailblazers? Quibi is a prime example of an absolute business wipeout. They got a bunch of investor money together, showed no interest in what viewers actually want, and then went down in flames immediately upon public release of the product. The whole thing was a disaster that didn't accomplish anything beyond putting a bunch of capital in the pockets of C grade C suite players.