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This thread is really showing which people actually read articles
At the same time, social networking is built into the most popular Chinese online shopping platforms, like Taobao, Tmall, and JD.com. They feature livestreamed videos of shopping influencers, and robust chat and photo-sharing functions, blurring the lines between social media and e-commerce.
The model has delivered: In 2023, TikTok’s Chinese sister app, Douyin, said its platform sales exceeded 2 trillion yuan ($2 billion). Xiaohongshu doesn’t disclose detailed figures, but the app’s aggressive expansion into social commerce in 2023 coincided with the first year it turned a net profit to the tune of $500 million.
So China has several profitable social media companies and a model that works regardless of the platform. It feels like Insta has tried this and doesn’t quite understand the mechanics but imitates showing influencer driven decisions. The difference is that western influencers sell their exposure while TikTok (et al) use influencers as their product and charge to alter the algorithm to expose the product to a targeted audience. It’s insidious because people will be shown something that they didn’t know they wanted and led to believe that they made the decision to get this thing. It’s Inception, but with our hobbies and interests.
The ramifications for niche porn are tremendous. Both weird categories of pornography and the idea that small groups will be fed a constant stream of their own unique interests. Imagine if you didn’t know this was happening and had an expensive hobby. Social media wants you to buy things and will give you the connection to spend instead of pursuing the hobby.
The hobby may soon not be about what we do but what we bought to show we are hobbyists. Consumption as participation. I guess we already do this with streaming entertainment, so why not?
Despite the downvotes (post was at -2 at the time of this comment), this is actually an interesting article that talks about the differences in approach between platforms.
“Overwhelmingly, Chinese social apps are competing with traditional e-commerce platforms,” he said. “The fact that U.S. lawmakers aren’t talking about this signals that Western apps are going to be playing catch-up for a very long time, no matter what happens to TikTok.”
Agreed, never use TikTok so I never realized but the angle on sales vs advertising is really interesting.
It makes a lot of sense.
If you can incorporate sales and advertising into your product in a very seamless and addictive way, then people will use your free app for its entertainment value and make you money.
It’s not that seamless depending on the content you usually consume.
I feel like I keep seeing the same single livestream trying to sell me a phone charger, and then roughly the same 5 or 6 videos trying to sell me a specific product over and over again.
As long as I don’t report or say “I keep seeing this ad” it will show me the same ones so they are easy to skip.
Usually it’s something I started watching until I realized it was an ad, but because I started watching it one time it thinks I’m interested so it will continually show it to me.
Once you spot them they are easy to skip. (at least, until they get better at masking then and then it will get harder).
What is the secret sauce?
According to the article text:
A key driver behind the success of Chinese apps is that they have integrated e-commerce into their platforms, blending entertainment and networking with sales to monetize their famously addictive algorithms, according to Chinese social media experts and marketing firms.
Oh so they’re wrong. Okay
They use mind-control technology to brainwash children so that, when the secret signal is sent through TikTok, they rise up and murder every adult.
This is why we gotta ban TikTok!!! \s
It kinda looks like the US might move to the other end of the cultural colonialism thing.
It might be worth it to pick some mandarin up.
I don’t see Mandarin taking over English as the default language, so to speak. Mainly because it’s way easier for people who know languages like Spanish, German, other European languages to pick up English as a second language then it would be for them to learn Chinese or another Asian one.
Yeah, but there are probably more of Mandarin speakers than all the others combined.
Native English speakers are definitely a minority globally. And I’m not even saying taking over, just that in some places it might be an additional one, and English won’t be the language, only a language.
To the point that not knowing Mandarin at all might be a similar disadvantage in the world as not knowing English at all.
The writing’s been on the wall for a while hasn’t it? Several of my non-Chinese classmates I graduated university with took Mandarin as their 2nd language since elementary school and speak it as well as the mainlanders (according to the Chinese exchange students, anyways).
What, it’s not e commerce , its massive amounts of data, and a massive amount of content. Most people i know who use tik tok never use the store, they use tik tok because it gives them a seemingly limitless amount of content that interests them. They’re able to do this not because they have some secret sauce but because of the sheer volume of people using and posting to the app. The more people watch the more data they have for there algorithm to identify trends, interest groups, interest groups correlations etc. to allow them to identify and target content to an audience. The more people that post the more you can inundate that audience and keep the infinite scroll going.
If tik tok did get shut down and everyone switched to reels or YouTube they would benefit from the increased scale and it would be pretty much the same app within a couple months.
They’re not as repressive as American ones.
TikTok is the site that gave us the euphemism “unalive” because “murder” and “suicide” and related terms were censored. That’s repressive af.
Yep. But that’s only on American TT. Different rules. And it got waaaaaay worse when Shou Chow inserted himself fully up Chumps ass.
