On: TikTok’s Chinese owner offers to forego stake to c...

[smrk007]

Or even a TikTok China and TikTok for the rest of the world? (Considering the ban of TikTok in India and the perceived threat of TikTok amongst several other countries as well.)

[dragonwriter → smrk007]

> Or even a TikTok China and TikTok for the rest of the world?

TikTok is banned in China, Douyin (also owned by ByteDance) is effectively “TikTok China”.

[smrk007 → dragonwriter]

Interesting. Thank you for clearing that up.

[homarp → smrk007]

"TikTok China" exists already, it's Douyin. It was there first (2016). Bytedance created TikTok as "international" Douyin in 2017, then merged it with musical.ly.

[homarp → homarp]

Hidden forces behind Toutiao: China’s content king - https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3x-hidden-forces-behind-... is an interesting read.

[baybal2 → homarp]

Too much hype.

2 reasons for the meteoric rise:

Super duper aggressive marketing spend, akin Apple's iphone rollout.

A long going murmur about them using funny accounting to drive their valuation into stratosphere, and use it to raise money.

"Machine learning" and everything else all fluff.

I can pretty much imagine something akin to page rank for videos being used, with some perceptrons sprinkled on top.

[starfallg → baybal2]

>Super duper aggressive marketing spend, akin Apple's iphone rollout.

That's the real reason. Bytedance spent millions, possibly hundreds of millions, to buy those users. You couldn't escape from those ads in 2019.