They are identical in the same way that my Hacker News and Facebook are identical. They are both places where people post stuff and comment on stuff but the community in each is very different.
If Hacker News were to shut down for just the US users and people were told to go continue the conversation on Facebook do you think that it would feel the same?
Part of what makes TikTok and Hacker News great is the interaction with people all over the world. What's going to happen to the diaspora? Are they going to all end up in one place?
Again, if Hacker News kicked out all of the Americans living on US soil then would the rest of the users follow the Americans onto Facebook to continue the conversation?
100%. I used to love meetups in sf via meetup back in the day, really genuine people wanting to learn new things at the time. When that platform collapsed, it basically wasn’t replaced at all.
Same thing could be said of the academic side of Twitter. It’s now fragmented across Twitter, Bluesky, mastodon, and the level is discussion is very diminished
It depends on what content you watch on TikTok. Many comedy content creators on TikTok have identical, mirrored copies of their content on Instagram (an example is Leenda Dong, who has been very popular on both TikTok and Instagram).
This was also tested in practice in India, when the country banned TikTok in 2020. Rest of World published a report in 2023 with the conclusion that most users simply switched to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts without much complaint, just as the previous commenter predicted: https://restofworld.org/2023/america-india-tiktok-ban/
If Hacker News were to shut down for just the US users and people were told to go continue the conversation on Facebook do you think that it would feel the same?
Part of what makes TikTok and Hacker News great is the interaction with people all over the world. What's going to happen to the diaspora? Are they going to all end up in one place?
Again, if Hacker News kicked out all of the Americans living on US soil then would the rest of the users follow the Americans onto Facebook to continue the conversation?