Evans: TikTok's innovation is its discovery mechanics, not the video format
Benedict Evans · Clubhouse and the endless cycle of social apps · Feb 14, 2021 · at 15:40
Tech analyst Benedict Evans discusses social network primitives and content containers, contrasting TikTok's discovery engine with YouTube's desktop-era model.
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“The new thing about TikTok is the swiping and the recommendation. So it's the, you could call that a network, but it's the mechanics that you build around how you show people what the video is. As opposed to YouTube, which is a basically a very desktop, very like 2005 of course, because it's owned by Google. It's like a very backward looking, very 2005 interaction model of how you would discover and see things. And so that's interesting. The, so the point is like the tick tick tock. It's about the wrapper for the video, the container, the network, whatever the right word would be. It's not about the atomic unit itself. The atomic unit itself is not interesting. What's interesting is the way that it selects displays lets you move around between those atomic units.”
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