Top Highlights

• The Discover Page features hashtags. By the very act of featuring a hashtag, they signal to creators that if they create using that hashtag, they will get the distribution boost of that hashtag being featured on the Discover Page. Which raises the age-old conundrum, which came first, the Discover Page hashtag placement, or the hashtag's trendi...
• But TikTok has a strong form of this type of network effect. They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content. In their app, they have a wealth of features that make it dead simple to grab any element from another TikTok and incorporate it into a new TikTok.
• Or perhaps tap from one to the next, like Robin Sloan’s tap essay (I wish there a way to export this piece into a form like that, if someone built that already let me know).
• By network effects of creativity, I mean that every additional user on TikTok makes every other user more creative.
• TikTok’s Warp Scan filter is a bizarre concept for a filter in and of itself, but the myriad of ways TikTok users put it to use just shows what happens when you throw random tools to the masses and allow for emergent creativity.

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