When Facebook starts to look like TikTok
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
Facebook just pushed a new update, and when I opened it my first reaction was: did I tap the wrong app?
The whole screen had turned into full-screen video, swiping up and down, one clip after another. The experience was already very much like TikTok. I looked it up later and found Facebook really is testing a new video-first experience, where some users open the app and see full-screen video first instead of the traditional feed.
So I swiped through for a while.
And as I scrolled, I noticed something more interesting than the redesign: I hardly saw anyone I knew.
No friends, no old classmates, nobody's dinner out, nobody's kid's birthday. Mostly creators I don't know, news, short videos and recommendations.
That felt strange.
Because Facebook's core used to be the social graph.
Friends, relatives, colleagues, old classmates, even people you haven't seen in ten years. What made Facebook special was never how good its content was. It was that you knew the people behind it.
TikTok is the complete opposite.
TikTok doesn't care who you know. It only cares whether you keep watching.
If you like football, it gives you football. If you like business, it gives you business. If you linger two extra seconds on a video of a pretty woman, the next one may be another. What it manages isn't your relationships. It's your attention.
And now Facebook seems to be slowly heading the same way.
From a social graph to an interest graph.
The other thing I found a bit hard to take: the ads.
I hadn't scrolled for long before ads kept appearing. Some showed up every two or three pieces of content.
Lots of ads isn't the biggest problem in itself. TikTok has plenty too.
The problem is that when Facebook's ads are dropped into this full-screen experience, they feel very much like "an ad is an ad".
TikTok's real strength is that you often only realise a few seconds in that the person is selling something. The lines between creator content, UGC, product demos and ads are already very blurred.
On Facebook, though, it felt like this: one moment a creator is talking, the next there's a very traditional hard-sell ad, with Buy Now, Send Message, the price and the promotion all at once.
The whole experience is suddenly interrupted.
Facebook now faces a rather interesting problem.
Copying TikTok's full screen isn't hard.
Copying TikTok's recommendation algorithm can be done over time.
Even showing more and more ad inventory makes complete sense commercially.
But Facebook's biggest asset was never short video.
It's the real identities, friends, families, groups and relationship graph it has built over twenty-plus years.
That's very hard for TikTok to copy.
What if one day Facebook, in the fight for attention, slowly hides away what makes it unique, and every social app ends up opening to something that looks more and more like TikTok?
When every platform is fighting for our attention, what will actually be left that makes them different?
I used to open Facebook to see "how are the people I know doing lately".
Now Facebook seems to want to become: "Never mind who you know. I'll just give you something to watch."
Maybe from the point of view of engagement, watch time and advertising revenue, that's the right direction.
But as someone who has used Facebook for many years, I still find it a bit of a pity.
Because sometimes, a product's most valuable part isn't its newest feature, but the part nobody else can copy.
(And after a whole round of scrolling, the only thing that actually made me pause for two seconds was still a video of a scantily dressed pretty woman.)