604
ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US
(www.androidauthority.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
604 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
57944 readers
3101 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Call their bluff
It's probably not a bluff. They've pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there's not much room left to grow here. It would make more sense to focus their efforts on growing in other regions where they have plenty of headroom to increase their userbase and monetization. Depending on how things play out, they could match their current revenue in a matter of years and still have room left to grow. There's also the potential to re-enter the U.S. market down the line. Why would they throw that all away and essentially create their own competitor by selling their core technology and diluting/confusing their brand with whatever U.S. company they sell to?
I'd think the fact they've saturated the US market is exactly why it'd be too valuable to give up. They'd lose a ton of revenue, tanking their valuation. They may be better off selling. From there they could prob just clone it and promote a competing service in those unclaimed markets using a portion of the extra sale price they get for maintaining (and selling a product with) US market dominance
That... doesn't make sense to me. So because there's no room to grow, they pull out of the U.S. and lose the likely ~$1 bil spent on digital stickers for live streamers?
they use the same algorithm across all of their companies so selling it would create a strong competitor and the chinese government is likely to block the sale anyways. tiktok revenue is a small slice of bytedance's income, so it makes sense to swallow the relatively small loss to keep their product intact when it's crystal clear that it's far superior to anything else atm.
The tiktok algorithm is good in the same sense that cocaine is good.
Is it good or do they just have a massive network and data advantage. If tik tok left and everyone switched over to Instagram reels or YouTube shorts and they had the same amount of data tik tok has I think the experience would converge to whatever was on tik tok in a month or so.
There's no secret sauce to tik tok, they're throwing massive amounts of data at a recommendation AI and telling it to optimize for watch time, any sufficiently scaled company can do that nowadays. It's more a matter of getting and maintaining an audience to create that data and content creators, both of which due to the network effect, and without federation, are drawn to the biggest service, not necessarily to the best.
I love how the media has thrown around the word algorithm. They don’t need to sell their algorithm for a competitor to compete. An algorithm produces some result output. So you could easily clone an algorithm without knowing its exact implementation.
Maybe I know quicksort, but you know mergesort. The customer doesn’t give a fuck which algorithm was used, so long as it’s sorted.
This is a bad take. Yes, “algorithm” is a vague term, but it’s incorrect to suggest that they’re easily cloned. These algorithms are what makes social media companies. Without them, they wouldn’t have the same kind of user engagement. It’s why, outside of the fediverse, social media companies try to hide or demote linear timelines. It’s why they pour most of the R&D money into the recommendation algorithms.
But that’s not really an algorithm.
algorithm is a word employed here to help dumb down the concept of the IP that people will want to buy from tiktok; no one means a literal algorithm.
That was my original point. The media and hence business / management use this term (incorrectly)
They could just say IP, or platform, or service, or implementation. But I guess saying algorithm makes everyone sound smart.