How Network Structure Shapes Defensibility and Scalability

The effectiveness of the TikTok experience is found in what it doesn’t require. Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging. The short-video format grabs the user’s attention at a more primal level, relying on visual novelty, or a clever interplay of music and actio... See more

With TikTok, the fact that it’s a new network is actually a feature, not a bug. There is an inherent conflict in the goals of creators for the different formats, and this tension is I think keeping a lot of people from posting to Reels.

I’ll give you an example. Just look at Reels, Instagram’s version of TikTok. It seems to be growing much slower than Stories did, and my theory is it’s because the network structure of Instagram is, to some degree, incompatible with the network structure of TikTok.