My understanding was that TikTok was basically the Chinese response to periscope and vine, which was popular, but couldn't make money. TikTok's scheme is to be spyware that even puts Facebook to shame, in a way that I'm not convinced isn't just government spyware disguised as social media where the point isn't to make a profit to begin with. If similar attempts have failed because of monetization struggles, I don't see an identical competitor emerging. We alrealy have many close substitutes.
They are/were planning to IPO, and their financial will be published so I doubt the conspiracy theory. I've used the original TikTok(Dou Yin), it is super addictive, even my parents fall into that. They do a very good job in terms of engaging both the viewer and content producer(profit cutting etc.)
In my opinion, are still "evil" in terms of hijacking our brain, but I am a bit fed up with those prevailing political prejudice nowadays for anything related to China.
This turned out to be fake. The commentor later said they couldn't provide evidence because the hard drive on their MacBook died and it was too much work to reverse engineer the app again.
