Last February, I wrote a product teardown of the 10 core product mechanics that make TikTok such a deeply innovative and successful product. At the time, I asserted that TikTok’s breakthrough patterns of social design were so countercultural to the dominant follow-and-feed model that the product would be hard for existing large networks to successfully copy.
Six months later, with the launch of Instagram’s Reels product, we are about to see that thesis put to the test.
