The second order effects of a product ban

Oh boy.

What a weekend for our American friends. A rollercoaster of emotions. A dividing topic. Espionage, foreign affairs, and worldwide economic intrigue.

We're talking, of course, about the ban-not-so-much of TikTok.

What the hell was that?

Before we move onto more product-y things, let's quickly recap the timeline here.

• August 2020: President Trump wants to ban TikTok based on its Chinese ownership and fear of it being spyware.

• June 2021: President Biden feels the fear is unfounded (or, at least, unclear) and revokes the ban.

• March 2024: President Biden changes his mind and forces parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S.-based company within nine months or face a ban.

• December 2024: The US Federal Court confirms the ban will happen (despite ByteDance's protest).

• January 17, 2025: The US Supreme Court confirms TikTok will be banned unless ByteDance sell it by January 19.

• January 18, 2025: TikTok is banned for all US users.

• January 19, 2025: TikTok comes back online following President-elect Trump's promise to delay the ban via executive order.

What a time to be alive.

Second order effect

For about 24 hours, the internet was ablaze as ~170 million Americans lost access to the addictive social app.

It's been fun mapping out some of the second-order effects of such a cataclysmic (not really) event:

• Substack briefly took the first spot on the app store. CEO Chris Best noted an all-time high for subscriptions (free and paid).

• Bluesky, an app that already benefited from the Twitter/X drama, saw a ~20% spike in usage.

• Millions of Americans moved to similar-ish Chinese apps like RedNote (locally known as Xiaohongshu). RedNote was launched in 2013 and already had ~300 million monthly active users.

• Duolingo saw a 216% spike in US users trying to learn Chinese, presumably due to the RedNote migration.

Pouring one out for our product homies at all these companies who've had to deal with these exciting surges over the weekend.