The past week or so has felt like the dam breaking in terms of TikTok showing its ambition and illustrating the differing approach of eastern and western attention platforms.

First, why “attention platforms” and not “social media”? One reason is because TikTok refuses to call itself social media. More importantly is because this isn’t just about traditional social platforms. Social media as a discreet concept or experience type feels more archaic by the day. The guiding idea here comes from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who said (something along the lines of) the company doesn’t (just) compete against other TV and movie platforms but all other ways people spend their time. Name-checking options like TikTok, YouTube, and even sleep.

Back to TikTok. While most social platforms have been rushing to TikTok-ify (or BeReal-ify), The Trend Machine has been ignoring all of them and setting its sights on other sectors.

I would categorize the Silicon Valley approach as a vertical one. Adding iterative features that are similar to what they already have with everything geared towards maximizing ad inventory and, therefore, revenue. For Facebook, everything since the creation of the News Feed has been just another feed. This might also explain why Horizon Worlds and the dream of the metaverse is going so poorly.

My take on the Chinese approach is solely informed by what I know of WeChat and TikTok, so consider it highly imperfect. As you might guess, I see it as horizontal. Instead of asking “what format don’t we have,” they ask “what activity don’t we have?” Announcements or leaks have come out about TikTok potentially getting into product distribution, music streaming and podcasts, and it continues to build out its commerce capabilities.

Silicon Valley typically tackles efforts like this through minimum viable products or partnerships / integrations. TikTok is doing it themselves, including buying warehouses. But it’s not just TikTok, Shein is getting into the reselling game by building their own, in-app functionality. American retailers just partner with someone like ThredUp.

Elon wants to build (or turn Twitter into) an Everything App like WeChat. If he manages it, it will likely be in some crypto-ish decentralized way. TikTok is actively working towards building the American version of WeChat, in a very centralized way (much like the Chinese government). (I am highly skeptical that a true WeChat clone will happen in the US. The Everything App is more-or-less a digital representation of the state, so users didn’t have to adapt to the idea. It is also dangerous to map across countries on different points of their development and adoption curves.)

Only time will tell if their bets pay off, but we’re watching the fallout of one approach to building an attention platform while witnessing an attempt at another approach.