Amid a wave of heated debate over whether TikTok should be banned, another ByteDance product, Lemon8, has popped up and quickly climbed into the top 10 on America’s app stores.
Lemon8’s sudden rise is reminiscent of TikTok’s early-day growth. At the time Vine had already pioneered short video sharing in the U.S., but TikTok took the media format to the next level through its content recommendation algorithms, a system that had proven immensely successful in China for its sister app, Douyin.
Some industry observers are now describing Lemon8 as something at the crossroad of Instagram, Pinterest and Amazon, but those familiar with the Chinese internet ecosystem would immediately recognize that the app is an instance of “copy-from-China”.
For much of China’s early internet history...
