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Frame from What kids really do on Musical.ly Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

What kids really do on Musical.ly

PaymoneyWubby
Commentary
YouTube
Cited on HN 5 times, 2018–2020, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Cited as an outsider's critical look at Musical.ly and TikTok and the child-safety problems of video platforms.

A commentary video by YouTuber PaymoneyWubby reacting to children's content on the Musical.ly app, which became TikTok. It highlights the child-safety concerns of young kids dancing on a public social platform.

2 citations · 3 critical · Commentary · partly dated

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@css Feb 2019 Cites it
on HN thread On YouTube, a Network of Paedophiles Is Hiding in Plain Sight
> Enter “twister girl” and autocomplete suggests “little girl twister in skirt” Jesus… Credit where credit is due, I learned about this from MattsWhatItIs: [link] Which is similar to the recent videos PayMoneyWubby has been exposing: [this video] and [link] It reminds me of a darker version of [link] .
@hn_check Aug 2020 Cites it
on HN thread Facebook launches its TikTok rival, Instagram Reels
"Everyone calls me stupid every time I bring up the fact that Twitter had a better TikTok before TikTok in Vine" The view that "Vine was tiktok before tiktok" is extremely common. Vine was very popular, was a trend beachhead, but it just wasn't something Twitter was really interested in so they shanked it. Speaking of which, I didn't realize that musical.ly morphed into TikTok. I knew musical.ly only from Paymoneywubby - [this video]
@burger_moon Aug 2018 Pushes back
on HN thread Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
They left off the part that gets brought up anytime someone asks what musical.ly is/was. Which is an app filled with young teens being advertised to old men. I haven't used the app yet, I was interested in checking it out and maybe I'll play around with it but every discuss about tiktok and musical.ly comes back to it just being a weird platform that seems to exploit young teens and showcase the videos to old men. Here's a video someone made recently explaining it better [this video]
@sorenjan Sep 2018 Pushes back
on HN thread Bytedance said to be valued at over $75B in new round
I've never used Musica.ly myself, and I don't have any kids of my own, but I came across this video [0] where a Youtuber looked at clips from it. It seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen, I can't see how it could be worth that much money. I wouldn't want any of my future kids anywhere near there. [0] [this video] (NSFW language)

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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