Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Meta's blind spot
Meta had stopped Snapchat's growth by layering Snapchat's product onto its own network. TikTok became a blind spot because it looked like another social network. It is an entertainment product, a user-generated content network, built on the insight that limiting the best content to your social network is an artificial constraint. TikTok gives you the best content from across the whole network.
Best content in the world
Most of that content is crap, and the math still works in absolute numbers. With a huge amount of content, the absolute amount of great content is large even if its share is infinitesimal. Meta served content from people you know, while TikTok served the best content from around the world, and that took a huge chunk out of Meta.
Meta had to shift. Instagram with Reels is now an entertainment product that pulls from the entire network, and social networking lives on in the group chat.
How does TikTok choose what to show?
TikTok's feed ranks videos by signals from your own behavior, such as how long you watch, what you replay, and what you like or share. It has said publicly that its For You page weighs these signals instead of whom you follow. That makes it an interest graph, built around your tastes, rather than a social graph built around your friends.
How did Meta respond to Snapchat's rise?
Instagram launched Stories in August 2016, in a format that closely resembled Snapchat's. Because Instagram already had a large audience, the feature reached people who had never opened Snapchat. Snapchat's growth slowed in the following quarters.
Why did Instagram add Reels in 2020?
Reels launched in 2020 as Instagram's answer to short videos from strangers. It put a feed of recommended clips next to the feed of friends' posts. The launch came the same summer India banned TikTok, and Reels rolled out there first.
More from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
