The internet’s mega-platforms are slowly merging into one great mass of sameness, and even the hottest companies in the world aren’t immune to the trend. TikTok’s winning strategy of focusing on short-form vertical videos has found fans on other Internet platforms, and now TikTok is taking a page from its competitors’ books, reportedly borrowing from what made them popular.
TikTok is working on launching a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images in an apparent attempt to compete with Instagram, a service best known for its ability to share still photos. Instagram, of course, has expanded into video and Stories itself, taking bits and pieces from other services and incorporating them into its own product.
Instagram’s parent company Meta’s other services are also frequent borrowers. As is almost every social service you can imagine. Remember that wonderful Stories Boom that led everyone from Line to Spotify to Instagram to LinkedIn to try out the popular sharing format. If it works for one social media service, expect the rest to follow in some way at some point — probably sooner rather than later.
There is good logic behind the effort. The answer is because X wants to be a superapp. The more a service can offer its user base, the more time it can spend within the app’s walls. Expanding a feature set can boost engagement time and thus how much revenue a social media service can earn. At the same time, bloat is a real issue that can diminish the user experience and render an app, well, Facebook on time.
This issue — the slow commercialization of digital services via sameification — it’s similar to why we’re seeing LinkedIn try to ape the New York Times’ capabilities in gaming and, to some extent, why big tech platform companies end up trying to be good at everything: the never-ending need to increase in revenue. Maybe that’s why your favorite app always looks more like an alien world as time goes on. It will evolve away from what made it special and unique, but because sticking to those guns is not the way to build a service that will be used by the maximum number of people. For this, you need to become Facebook.
