> How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps
Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture.
This is important to the article's thesis. At least part of the early insight into the US market comes from the founders living and working in the US.
IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American / western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of Chinese style censorship.
What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. Of course, politics and toxicity exist all over Chinese internet as well, they just get filtered / harmonized over time or never reach many eyes in the first place. It maybe a bad unitary model for governing cyberspace policy for an entire country, but it's has merits when applied to certain audiences / networks and the west should learn from it even if TikTok gets banned.
It's not the "wholesomeness" that's unique to China, but the commitment to maintain that wholesomeness systematically as an platform identity which is a trained requisite for surviving Chinese censorship. The issue with many western media platform is they start off wholesome like TikTok but inevitably reach Eternal September criticality with unconstrained growth. Western moderation philosophy is typically to let this run, eyeballs at all cost, until they're forced to respond incrementally to outside forces. This alienates the masses who don't care for the fringe drama. The Chinese model is preemptively tame the space because censorship board diktat is arbitrary so best to constrain space. This accommodates the masses and alienates fringe voices. The enforcement tools use to mean unsophisticated mass deletion, but now there are systems of shadowban, limiting promotion of material etc, i.e. tons of steps to curtail "problematic" content before banhammer. The latter is rarely exercised in west, because other strategies seem to work well enough. This isn't to say masses won't get tired of TikTok eventually like every other media platform, but that it's content philosophy does make it stand out from western counterparts which might explain it's popularity. People are hooked TikTok because it doesn't feel like it's heading towards Eternal September, but maybe it's only a matter time.
This doesn't make any sense, I use tiktok and there's plenty of content I wouldn't expect china or america to endorse. There are lots of videos dedicated to communism, capitalism, uyghur muslims, BLM, etc. It's actually fairly open and this type of content gets noticeably boosted by the algorithm if you express interest in it, and gets a ton of likes too. There is also plenty of happy cat videos as well if that's your thing.
Also, ugly people get a lot of attention. I would expect china's social credit system to discredit those who are less attractive, but on tiktok you see less than conventionally attractive creators get a big following. They don't even need to be freak shows, it's just an app that's full of regular people openly talking about regular things. Very much the opposite of what I have heard about the way media works in china.
Allowable overton window differs between region to region - TikTok international is a business and will respond to local pressures, i.e. west shifted to laxer content restrictions due to MSM reporting of possible censorship last year. But behind the scenes the algorithm is biased towards mainstream content and limits dissemination of fringe / radical views, a must if you want to reach mass eyeballs in China. This is mostly in reference to actual ideology and not the dumb article about censoring ugly/poor, that's branding decision for advertisers. It follows same pattern on Chinese net, dissenting opinions are allowed to exist, either for limited time or exposed to limited eyes, unless gained too much traction in which case it will be removed, or endorsed for political purposes. Social credit has not been expanded to extent west think it does. Nor is Chinese internet as manicured west thinks. It's every bit as much of a shitshow as western internet except janitors come in to sweep up very frequently. If you experience it live, there's shit flinging all over the place. But TikTok itself very much feels like Douyin, lots of regular ppl doing regular things, very little drama or divisive topics because the janitors are proactively working in the background to shape platform sentiment versus west which is more reactive. I'm not saying it's analogous to Chinese net as a whole, but what is allowed to be mainstream and dictate the rhythms of society.
> Social credit has not been expanded to extent west think it does.
OT but this is the first time I see China's "social credit system" not being described as a myth on HN. People usually just repeat the myth pushed by mainstream media. Can you suggest something to read on this?
Otherwise the system is still very new and in progressive. If it's anything like BRI, it could be a massive uncoordinated internal shitshow of competing jurisdictions and incentives that doesn't pull together into anything cohesive for a long time.
TikTok has been publicly criticized for their censorship and filtering countless times, so I wouldn't doubt that they toned it down a bit in the non-Chinese versions while they're actively getting negative coverage.
1. the regulation and AI for Douyin and TikTok is completely separate and different. On TikTok I frequently see anti-China videos.
2. From my experience on Chinese social media, the debate on policies and voices on public grievances are common place. When there is a huge public blacklash for something the government is done, it might be filtered to tone down the "heat", but I believe that is to reduce the chance of the incident develop into uncontrolled populism and social unrest. For these incidents, the government usually acts really fast to address the incident. An investigation could be launched, and any government official found with wrongdoing is promptly sacked.
I find for public grievances, the government is already addressing many of them. For others, the government usually acknowledge it after sometime and add it to its working plan. For example, a lot of people were criticizing air quality in early 2010s. By 2013, government's added air quality to its working agenda and released a series of comprehensive plans to address air quality. For the past 8 years, the work on air quality has been consistent. And you can see how much air quality has improved in China. Same thing with poverty, education issues, left behind child, health care etc. So I believe the government does listen to the public, even though public backlash might be filtered at the moment.
A group of people demand change, but changes need time, government and society need time to adjust. The group that demand change could think that its their right to demand change and world should listen. They might use tactics such as massive protests to demand the world's attention. But mass protests in China massively dense cities could cause financial and live lost to others. At that point the group that demand change inadvertently infringing on others right to peace and good health. This is fear. The fear is not about criticisms for the government, but its about hot blooded public demands that grow into populism and hate. And populism creates irrationality in the society that doesn't help to address the issue and might cause more damages. Criticisms are to be addressed in the framework set out by the political system and in an environment that allows rational debate and negotiations.
Filtering on Chinese internet is about controlling populism, any kind of populism. In fact, articles that stoke mindless love for the ccp, personal admiration for xijingping, or hot blooded nationalism are also filtered. Also the platforms will try to remove fake news, spam accounts soliciting money, child pornography, and other illegal content. This stuff seems to be practiced in western internet.
I don't know this is the right way to do things though.
I've replied to other comments in the thread, but yes TikTok content varies between regions but the broad point is the algorithm will regress towards the wholesome instead of fragment towards radicalism over time. It doesn't not represent whole of Chinese internet, which your observations cover, but the model that survives censorship laws to reach wide spread popularity by focusing on wholesome content to preempt frequently arbitrary censorship whims. Petitioning and politics and dissent is widespread over Chinese internet, it's not as closed as most in the west believe, but they're happening on other platforms and serve as release valves for complaints and contradictions. Douyin / TikTok is where you go to avoid all that. So if you've been growing up on western internet, seeing Twitter / FB descent into insanity, TikTok is a welcome reprieve, with the caveat that said reprieve is by design and not novelty - it may very well fall out of favor with ban or time, but at it's heart, it's designed to stay wholesome which makes it an interesting alternative model in western market. .
You gotta give the masses a sense that the party is doing something for them, usuallly something unrelated to party affairs and politics, like civil criminal cases, that's when the censorship turn "lenient", and these specific cases that got public attention usually get to be solves quickly. But you never see sensitive matters being allowed to even exist, and any account who dares to challenge this boundary is quickly terminated..
That's the magic of censorship, to make the masses feel good, coz ignarance is bliss, the news are harmonious and bad apples are handled by the dear gov.
> [...] the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture...This is important to the article's thesis.
This is the opposite of the article's thesis. Musical.ly hit a wall. Only after it was purchased by Bytedance, rebranded as TikTok, and Bytedance poured their magical, cultural-agnostic AI sauce (and ad dollars) did TikTok truly take off. By all indications, this AI magic was wholly created in China and retrofitted onto TikTok.
The article's thesis is that AI doesn't need to understand the culture when it can understand the person at an individual level. The closing anecdote emphasizes the point: a Chinese startup that has a number 1 news app in India and not a single person in the company can read any of the content in their app (Hindi)?! How is that for not understanding a culture?
Musical.ly hit a wall. Only after it was purchased by Bytedance, rebranded as TikTok, and Bytedance poured their magical, cultural-agnostic AI sauce (and ad dollars) did TikTok truly take off. By all indications, this AI magic was wholly created in China and retrofitted onto TikTok.
Music.ly blew up in 2015 and was in the top app charts for a year before Bytedance bought them. They were at 133 million registered users and 40 million MAU in 2016. What was the wall they hit?
Maybe that's true, but in that case it was just Bytedance as a financial savior, not technical or product savior. Could have been Facebook, Google, or anyone with deep pockets.
As an AI-focused human, I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that ByteDance' AI made the difference here - not because I dispute that AI can pierce cultural boundaries, but because doing so is a purchasable commodity for a scaled social platform. The magic sauce here was getting the flywheel turning to have users invent content templates native to the medium. Ad dollars, as you mention, and some smart decisions about biases (maybe, as another commenter says, the creative positivity that survives CN censorship).
This is misleading. The founders grew up and went to University in China. Working in California for 5 years likely isn't enough for someone to deeply understand US culture. Same goes for anyone living and working in a foreign country for 5 years. There's some things you can never understand.
I wouldn't say you can never . Because I went to Italy and even the first year I started to see the difference between my country/culture and theirs and what business opportunities could benefit one or the other. It's so simple. 5 years is enough especially for someone with an entrepreneurship mindset.
Yeah I disagree. Many young successful entrepreneurs are in their early 20s and have spent less time than 5 years actually experiencing and understanding the culture they live in. I think having some immersion is necessary, but 5 years is probably plenty.
Five years is enough time to understand a lot more than someone who has never set for in the country. Naturally, there's other things that they still wouldn't understand after twenty years.
Other companies are failing because they're making mistakes that someone who's been in the US less than a year could recognize. ("Don't use imagery of white and black people facing off to advertise that your product comes in white and black colors.")
This is a false dichotomy. I don't understand half of the things my parents do but that doesn't mean I don't understand my culture. Culture is defined by people living in it, not an isolated piece.
>At the time Musical.ly got renamed TikTok, it was still dominated by teen girls doing lip synch videos. Many U.S. teens at the time described TikTok as “cringey,” usually a kiss of death for networks looking to expand among youths, fickle as they are about what’s cool. Scrolling the app at the time felt like eavesdropping on the theater kids clique from high school. Entertaining, but hardly a mainstream entertainment staple.
TikTok devs mentioned PewDiePie reacting to these cringey videos as a large impact for the company. His massive gamer audience downloaded the app to make fun of the early TikTok users too and got sucked in. They started making memes instead of lip-sync videos and it took off from there.
From the outside looking in a lot of their success came from sexualizing (underage) teenage girls. Don't know if that would've flown as well if the app had come out of Facebook or a different American tech giant.
Is there a way a social app targeted at young people in the US doesn't end up looking as if their success comes from sexualizing girls? I don't use any social media, but Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat also seemed to me like that in their early stages. Maybe Whatsapp is an exception, and that might be why they largely failed here but took off elsewhere.
I think the difference maker is that new social media apps like TikTok are artificially promoting this content from day zero via algorithms as opposed to Facebook and instagram which started by showing that content only from within your own network or through your own intentional curation. Now the second they identify a male you get a discover page full of bikini pictures and women bending over in yoga pants whether you want it or not. And of course this brings all the teenagers to the yard, and older predatory males with deeper pockets... “we’d love to have you model for us!” comments all over the place the second a pretty girl puts her profile to public.
I installed TikTok out of curiosity after reading this article. I scrolled without stopping for a couple hours and then uninstalled the app.
An endless stream of algorithmically curated 30-second videos is pure crack to my brain, apparently. I bet a lot of younger folks with still-developing brains are also unable to resist.
There's a classical conditioning loop where you see an attractive woman dancing to a song, which makes you subconsciously start to like the song, then you like videos with that song... it's the combined power of earworms and arousal. If they somehow make it taste like cheesecake we will have achieved full wireheading.
I'm on the younger side, it's very addictive. People love to come up with wild theories for why the app blew up, but I think it's just pure algorithmically curated fun.
TikTok really is next-generation social media. Interesting that this should come out of China and not the west. Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.
Less monopolies, more so western culture. Many of TikTok's algorithms would be subject to great scrutiny if run by a western company. YouTube would face riots if it were caught openly supressing or hiding videos of disabled, unattractive, or simply poor people. But such "innovation" is fine for a Chinese company.
I feel like as of late, when China sees some success that the US does not, there’s a sentiment that they succeeded only because they’re a lesser society. They have fewer coronavirus cases only because Chinese people are docile, obedient sheeple who hate freedom, or TikTok succeeded because Chinese corporations are happy to discriminate against groups that western corporations would obviously protect out of the goodness of their hearts.
The Slate article you linked talks about Facebook doing a similar thing, and facing a similar backlash.
Is it really that hard to believe that a country of over a billion people, with a mature domestic tech industry and startup scene, would eventually produce something that would compete successfully in the west?
I'm not the GP and therefore I'm not 100% sure the idea of Western social-justice mobs stifling innovation was intended as a compliment to the West.
Anyway if anyone takes anything at all from this, it's the idea that the whole source of TikTok's success is in making culture (and therefore culture wars) irrelevant. Want to look at videos of disabled, unattractive, poor people all day? Have at. Not being flippant there, although now that I think about it, I bet there are vast differences between some people's publicly-espoused views and their own watching habits, were they ever revealed by TikTok's algorithm.
Edit: Went off on all sorts of tangents, but yes I totally agree with your point. In Trump-era America even success & failure fall into the fact-free zone.
We succeed: Of course! We're awesome! So proud!
We fail: It wasn't fair! Everybody had it out for us!
They succeed: Bunch of cheaters! We took the high road!
They fail: Of course! We're just too awesome for 'em! Better luck next time!
> or TikTok succeeded because Chinese corporations are happy to discriminate against groups that western corporations would obviously protect out of the goodness of their hearts.
No one believes western companies do it out of the goodness of their heart.
They do it in part because of fear of backlash and in part because their CEO's (especially Twitter's, Youtube's and Reddit's) want to project a philantropist image without actually doing good things.
The idea of Chinese people (and Asians in general) being obedient to authority is something that I’ve heard frequently from people and in the news, but I didn’t mean to imply that sandworm101 made that particular argument.
You can also look at the initial blaming of COVID on China in the media...The COVID pandemic was the result of either 3rd world-like food markets where poor/dirty people sell exotic meats to each other or that COVID got out of some underground lab where they do experiments and can't contain anything.
No one explicitly said that but it was implied pretty heavily especially when you look at how people received the news and interpreted it in memes and whatnot. I sent pictures of Wuhan to some family/friends and they were amazed at how big and impressive of a city it is. They thought it was like a small developing village.
It's kind of how we always talk about China though (regarding your initial comment) and I'm not sure if/when it will ever stop.
While I wouldn't phrase it that way, the so-called wet markets where dozens of live animals are sold in unsanitary conditions are a problem. Western nations do have a variety of health/hygiene laws that effectively make such markets illegal. They are seen as a primitive/backwards/dangerous throwback to something rightly done away with long ago.
Western nations don't have those kinds of wet markets, but we have plenty of our own unhygienic, dangerous practices when it comes to food.
Take factory farming, for example. Take the mountains of antibiotics we are shoving into factory farmed animals. Take the numerous warnings from experts in biology about how this use of antibiotics is incredibly dangerous, because it has the potential to be a breeding ground for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
Now, consider what we are doing about shutting down, or even mitigating the danger posed by those factory farms. Next to nothing - there's a few fringe environmentalist groups, there's a small vegan movement, there's a few yuppies who make sure to tell everyone that they only source organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat that costs them $40/lb. But the average person doesn't give two damns about it - and the average politician in agricultural-heavy ridings is entirely in the pocket of those industries. [1]
Disclaimer: I don't buy organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat, that would cost me $40/lb. I'm part of this problem. There's a lot of utility in cheap meat. Meat is delicious. But alternatives do exist.
[1] See the popularity of ag-gag laws - intended to suppress information, so that the public only gets one side of this story.
Hygiene in China is like in medieval Europe, nowadays in Europe only big cities are dirty which is in the most cases result of mismanagement of mayor/s.
In Southeast Europe where I live cities are clean af. The thing that bothers me personally is absurd amount of pets on the streets in my country. When I go for a walk I see like 30 dogs.
Have you been to China? The tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai are positively manicured compared to the average US city (or Paris, for that matter).
Of course it's a huge country and it's not too hard to find an open-air market with meat hanging on hooks or public lavatories that you wouldn't want to enter without a hazmat suit, but people emptying their night soil out the window into the street below is not really a thing anymore.
In my travels to about 8~9 cities in China, I don't recall seeing anything that was dirtier than, say, Amsterdam or New York or Busan. Not having lived in Medieval Europe, I can't say exactly how dirty it was, but saying China is that dirty seems like an exaggeration.
But those dogs are probably far healthier than they were in the past. You don't fear rabies if one of them bites you. You aren't going to get a parasite if you pet them.
What is the origin of Covid-19? Last thing what I heard is that it is not wet market. Then Chinese blamed American soliders?! I think Wuhan Institute of Virology is the source but they will never admit the virus broke out of the institute.
I certainly saw a lot of people writing things like "they only succeeded because they welded people into their apartment buildings". I've also read that that only happened one time and was strongly criticized within China but oh well.
Yeah, it's really more like complete denial that China has less covid deaths per capita than USA, let alone 100x less. Though I have definitely seen statements like "well, this is the price of freedom and democracy."
I don't thing the things GP is talking about are indicators of a lesser society. I don't want to look at unattractive people, and there is nothing wrong with a social media service optimizing for that preference.
> there is nothing wrong with a social media service optimizing for that preference
I think there is. The world has already reached a point where we live in information bubble, surrounded by things we want to see and that agree with us. People are depressed and feel inadequate.
Formerly reputable news sources have realized that people don't want to be informed, they want to be outraged, or feel smug and correct, or see pictures of cats, and so real news is relegated to a lesser status.
I would much rather websites present me with the truth, even if I don't like it as much, than live my life seeing only attractive people and reading only good news, but ending up woefully depressed and un-informed, with feelings of inadequacy and no understanding of what in the world is broken.
I think news agencies have a responsibility to society to present news accurately, even if people find the news less pleasent to read than pictures of cats.
Similarly, I think social media companies have a duty to present a semi-accurate view of society where possible.
I would rather have a realistic view of what people look like than have a series of recommendation algorithms and feedback loops result in me seeing only "conventionally attractive" people.
Of course, we've kinda already screwed ourselves here with hollywood/tv/movies. Perhaps it's too late to step back.
I think it's fine that different social media companies target different demographics. There's no need to apply a blanket rule to all companies as to what content should be promoted on its platform. For example, people go to Netflix, Twitch, Youtube, and Pornhub for different types of video content, and it wouldn't make sense to require that they all present the same semi-accurate view of society.
I never said that sites that present a semi-accurate view of society shouldn't exist. But I don't think any particular site has an obligation to be fair, as long as they aren't misrepresenting their content.
I get your point, but I mean I see a ton of fat and ugly people on tiktok anyway, they even get huge followings because theyre funny and cool (though sometimes it's just because people can't look away lol). So maybe you should reconsider how you view people, unless you only want content you can drool over.
>> a mature domestic tech industry and startup scene, would eventually produce something that would compete successfully
Is it too much to also believe that a company subject to a radically different regulatory regime, and different cultural norms, might field a product that would not be considered acceptable elsewhere?
For example: How does TikTok handle children under 13yo? That is a real headache for western social media firms. Does China enforce similar rules? Would not having to obey such rules not represent an advantage for a product aimed at young people? The lawsuits and imposed fines suggest TikTok is substantially advantaged.
"The company was fined 186m won (£123,000) by the Korea Communications Commission (KCC). The KCC, the country's media watchdog, said TikTok collected data of children under 14 years old without the consent of legal guardians."
You can start a rule-breaking startup today in whatever stringently-regulated regime and worry about fines later when you hit it big (and the fines are often peanuts if you hit it big, imagine any late stage VC-backed company being slapped with a record $5.7m fine). Also, the age verification honor system is really pretty much a joke, it adds a little bit of annoyance and pretty much zero deterrence. Basically it’s about knowing to put up that page in the sign-up flow. So this “advantage” you’re talking about is fairly weak.
>YouTube would face riots if it were caught openly supressing or hiding videos of disabled, unattractive, or simply poor people. But such "innovation" is fine for a Chinese company.
You don't need an algorithm to hide unattractive people. Ever seen a modern TV show or a casting contest or seen the latest comic adaption in cinema? People voting out the unattractive or even unconventionally attractive is an old story, the more mainstream the content the more the stars look like models. On Youtube it happens with Likes and on TikTok it happens through some ML magic, I guess in China there's no fucks given about actually baking it into the algorithm directly but that's hardly more than a technical detail
I feel like this is overblown, because I see ugly and poor people in tiktok all the time (if doesn't matter if you're ugly or poor -- you can still make compelling content), and I occasionally see disabled people too.
Perhaps this is true for the very first content you see, but not true once the algo becomes personalized?
It is overblown, and isn't unheard of in the west. Any Hollywood casting call involves a US corporation judging people according to attractiveness, hiring only the most beautiful, but in the realm of social media this has been deemed unacceptable corporate behavior. The split is a purely cultural phenomena.
the entire TikTok India is filled with content from the lower caste. like, literally if you check out all the viral ones like the cringey indian joker, or the very popular one with the 2 really bad acting siblings, they were all shot in the slums.
Youtube is likely doing the same thing. It just have the political sensitivity to not state it out loud. And honestly, come on, every entertainment platform does that, range from roadside stripper house to movies, whether it is desirable or not.
Somewhat anecdotal but the Chinese app game in general seems very strong. My wife does video editing on Chinese social media and the variety of apps she has for editing videos and photos is bewildering. She can add in all kinds of animation and video effects, and different apps will provide different editing experience and features.
I look in the US apple store for video editing and I just don't see that kind of variety in the free/low-cost tier.
I think the article did a really good job highlighting the power of combining a worship-level deference towards algorithm and an incredibly deep pocket. In the West, if you are an upstart, you don't have the latter - who can spend $1B on paid install in a year while seeing uninspiring retention? - and if you are big, then you cannot afford the former given the immense scrutiny from the public and the press.
Another interesting factor is that ByteDance has unfettered access to both the Chinese and the Western markets. This makes it attractive to investors who wants to bet on an upstart who can fallback to its mature Chinese business.
I personally think TikTok is still unproven outside of China if you look beyond the hype. But I also agree the big US companies are sleeping at the wheel. But if you are printing money like FB, why not?
> In the West, if you are an upstart, you don't have the latter
In the East, or the North, or the South, if you acquired another company for 1B you’re certainly not an upstart. (Unless you still consider Dropbox, Airbnb, etc. upstarts.)
The point is not media format (short video clips) but the "sorting hat". That it breaks the traditional social media model with a news feed, discussions, a social graph of friends.
I think it is completely meaningful to call it next generation (or second generation where the social graph model is the first generation).
Also notice that this model can be applied to other media formats: Text, pictures, audio ...
This thread is completely missing the draw of TikTok, at least as it pertains to my teenagers. TikTok makes it fun and compelling to create content. My teenagers will actually go places with their friends to "make TikToks." The reason it is compelling, and this is not true of any other current social network, is that good content will get eyeballs -- the algorithm seems to be "fair" in terms of playing your content to enough people to see if it is any good, at which point it can get widely distributed. Most social networks start out this way, but eventually good user generated content gets drowned out by influencers and commercial interests. It remains to be seen if TikTok can stay this way.
Yep, I’ve come across a couple of times in my for you page videos posted with 0 likes from 0 follower, 0 following accounts. And plenty of low likes and followers accounts. It gives anybody a chance and that makes it engaging.
Yes. Even the vaunted algorithm is merely an improved way of doing this. I remember when "the long tail" became a slogan. What was meant was that if popularity is a power law, then at every level there's a shorter long tail. The point was to accentuate this, to find the celebrities in each niche and monetize them. The underlying mental model has always been the one from broadcasting.
Maybe TikTok comes from China because Communist ideology still influences the Chinese; or because they didn't have a Dick Cavett and a Frank Sinatra, celebrity TV. The ceremonies for the 1980 Moscow Olympics had no celebrities, but a diorama of the dozen Soviet cultures from the Ukraine to Kirghistan. The 1984 Olympics in the US had Lionel Ritchie. But Communists or not, the early promise of the internet was that you could participate, and it doesn't feel you can participate on Twitter.
>I think it is completely meaningful to call it next generation (or second generation where the social graph model is the first generation).
I don't really see it. We've seen the TikTok model before in Imgur, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Digg, and probably others. It's mostly memes, funny videos, how-tos, and attractive women. They've hit a sweet spot of editing tools and enforced short format to provide a constant stream of quick entertainment. But I don't see anything earth shattering or ground breaking there.
In all of the examples you provided there's either no personalization or you have to manually curate your feed. Tiktok and youtube are the only ones where your feed is automatically curate for you.
> Also notice that this model can be applied to other media formats: Text, pictures, audio ...
Actually, I don't think that this is as easy as you might think. The article goes into this a bit when saying that short video sequences are well-suited for such an algorithm because they provide a high frequency of "inputs" per time unit, but I think the article falls short of describing the other thing that makes videos particularly suitable (and, by extension, makes the assumption that "the TikTok algorithm" had a great future in many other places too, of which I am a bit more skeptical). This other critical thing is that video sequences in general also allow a huge variety of inputs to be gathered from consumption that text, pictures and audio can’t match.
- It is trivial to find out which part of a video a user has seen. This is nearly impossible to do reliably with textual content (assuming you don't have an eye tracker running).
- Instead of a still picture, a video provides much more things for the viewer to see. So instead of just knowing that in a picture there's a cat and you thus deduce the user likes cats, it's basically possible to split a video up in slices of which you know where there's a cat, and where there's a dog, and where there's whatever else, so from just that single video you might deduce info about the users' interest in cat/dog/whatever content all at once (depending on which parts a viewer has seen, which parts were skipped, at which point the viewer aborted, or at which point the like button was tapped).
- Video mostly also delivers audio, hence everything that you can gather from audio, like whether a user tends to prefer female or male voices, or which music style someone prefers, comes as a bonus when gathering info from video viewing
- If your videos' audio features someone speaking some text, you can speech-to-text that content and pump it into the usual machine learning modules, from simple sentiment analysis over trying to determine the topic someone talks about up to full-blown "trying to understand what this person is actually trying to say" and take that as an input for determining a viewers' interests. This is basically text analysis, so it lends itself to textual content as well, and audio too, but not so much to pictures.
Video is just really pumping out the maximum of all of these content formats in terms of potentially relevant data points about someones' interests, and it does so at really high frequency, especially if the length of each video is as short as on TikTok and thus the content producers have already performed the daunting work of condensing lots of content into the least number of seconds possible.
I'd like to see someone write a blog post taking a shot at (speculatively) "reverse engineering" how the TikTok algorithm works (or may work)...like what attributes it might extract from a video (some of which you've mentioned above) and what it might do with them. Basically, how the overall thing may work, as well as how it may improve over time, taking into consideration current cutting edge ML techniques and speculative future capabilities.
The article goes into this - for people just jumping into the comments:
The author states that while western algorithms are based on your follow graph (e.g. Instagram is relatively useless until you follow someone and even then your feed is based on your follower graph, like what people you follow like), TikTok builds this data on video features. This increases TikTok's stickyness because you don't need to do anything other than use the app for it adjust to your tastes. There's no need to "import" your contacts or suggest people you should follow, it just "knows" after you watch a couple videos.
YouTube mastered this years ago and that's why it is 3rd most visited website in the world and 2nd most used search engine in the world.
I see TikTok as a better version of Vine but I still can't understand if TikTok is so much popular and so much worth why did Twitter shut down Vine? Twitter is like modern MySpace it will fail sooner or later if management doesn't get replaced and if they don't start thinking long term.
I don't know about you, but my YouTube recommendations tend to be pretty useless. I can't remember the last time autoplay found me genuinely compelling content that wasn't already in my subscribed channels.
Youtube has been doing this for years. Clear your cookies then start watching youtube videos. Youtube will immediately begin tuning video suggestions to what you watch, no contact importing or channel subscribing necessary.
That sounds just like YouTube and how I presumed Vine worked though? E.g. that the majority of users don't set up any follow graph, and that most content users view is algorithmically-discovered and not like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram where most of the content is based on an explicit graph?
Well on desktop and even on mobile you can't browse Instagram freely without signing up or singing in, it is kinda double edge sword which forces you to join or backs you off.
The difference which actually changes quite a lot is that the maximum video length is much longer (six seconds vs a full minute). This lets people put more effort/content into their videos, allowing for more expressiveness than just memes. At the same time, a minute is short enough that it discourages the sort of rambling you might see on a freeform platform like YouTube. The outcome is a surprising amount of focused, creatively edited videos on a wide range of interests (I'm currently pretty deep in both crochet and recipe TikTok).
In my opinion the longer length also allowed audio-based trends (which Vine did introduce a year or so before its demise) to really take off. For all that older people mock TikTok dances, there's something to be said for users actively participating in creative trends instead of simply passively consuming them (and there are much, much worse things a teen could be doing on/for the internet than practicing half a minute of choreography).
There is an account I follow that's run by a man who's trying to beat a soda addiction. He's posted a video announcing that he hasn't drunk any fizzy drinks every day for the past fifty-eight days, and he seems to have inspired a lot of people to grab a water instead of a soda at least once. I wish more of my social media experience was like that.
I think the real difference compared to Vine is the amount of money that Bytedance sunk into advertising TikTok in past 2 years. All of the sorting hat stuff is nothing new. Without the follow graph, it doesn't endure.
> I'm currently pretty deep in both crochet and recipe TikTok
Anyone know if it is possible on TikTok to temporarily check out different genres, but not have them become a part of your profile? Basically an incognito mode I guess?
You can watch videos on Tiktok without an account. You can't search (on the web, at least - I've never installed the app) but simply visiting e.g. tiktok.com/tag/crochet will let you go through and watch content without limits. I used it for months that way.
Similar in the "posting short videos" thing, but some of the social features are pretty different from anything that's come before, like the ability to easily make a new lipsync video with the audio from a previous video, and then make all videos sharing an audio trivially searchable.
Am not myself a TikTok user, but my partner is, so I've seen a bunch of it second hand.
If we were really seeing the effect of monopolies how would Tiktok hold ground in US. FB could have actively gone after it and not allowed FB authentication or ads of Tiktok on FB. In fact, as mentioned in the article Tiktok grew by leveraging the dominant platforms like FB, Instagram.
I would still wait and watch on Tiktok phenomenon. It is a viral thing but has no moat as such and only $0.5 billion in expected revenue for this year. There are enough companies which can move in this space and suffocate it.
Vine was acquired pre launch. It was launched and allowed to run for a good amount of time before being shut down.
Twitter isn't an example of a well run company considering the alienating things they have done to third party devs but I wouldn't call this an effect of monopoly. Even ByteDance acquired Musical.ly which became Tiktok, they just had a clear idea of what to do with it.
Maybe this is too much navel staring but clearly, if the central thesis of the article is true, tiktok owes its success to prioritizing the content over the individuals. An interest graph, not a friend graph.
Besides stagnation... Could it be also an effect of "the West" becoming more open to collectivist ideals, where the individual is less important, and it's more about what you follow and not who you follow?
> Interesting that this should come out of China and not the west. Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.
I doubt that is the case here, since one could easily make the case that China has more monopolies and government control than the West. More likely, this has more to do with what makes things go viral. TikTok's rise was very much a viral sensation.
The main reason being ByteDance had deep pockets to acquire users. The amount of ad spend on user acquisition was unreal at $3m a day through 2018 and 2019. Literally billions were spent on promoting the app. Any half decent social media app would have done well.
The grandparent's comement is the exact same growth lead hype-cycle rhetoric that was said for Snapchat, Vine, Periscope, Yik-Yak and Shots. The hype is from ByteDance's VCs.
When they get their massive exit, the hype will deflate and the users will grow out of TikTok and find another rockstar social network. Rinse and repeat.
> Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.
American's will only wake up when it's too late. Zuck will bribe the government in the meanwhile. Corrupt countries become less competitive over time. America is trending on the path of corruption and it's visible to every outsider now, except for unfortunately American's themselves.
I'm sorry, did you just allude to America being more corrupt than China?
Granted, I'm American, and thus biased. I do see corruption in my government, but from what I can tell it's a small drop in the bucket compared to what goes on in China. Although I guess there could be debate on what defines corruption. But I still hear tales of basically needing to openly bribe officials to get contracts through manufacturing.
How do you think you get environmental assessments fast tracked? (Except we call it a "political donation" and "lobbying")
What do you think happens when a place like ALEC flies politicians on jaunts to get them to accept pre-written legislation?
Outside of political applications, what do you think happens when pharma reps take doctors to "conferences" in the Caribbean to get them to use their new meds?
On an individual level: What do you think that 'fraternal order of police' donation buys you, and what that car sticker is for?
It might be a bit more dressed up than a naked bribe, but it's still a bribe.
Is anyone else here trying to reduce their use of technology outside of the workplace? My hobbies are music, painting, and woodworking, and it's all I can muster to focus on a screen from 9-5. I do comment here on HN and I peruse other websites, but I don't actively engage with any social media except HN.
I just find myself questioning the merits of attention spent on these social media platforms, given the information quality and density is so much lower than HN.
Maybe this is where TikTok has succeeded: short, snappy, quickly accessed videos; much more informational content than textual or image-based FB or Reddit, not to mention more skillfully executed, right? It's like a short-form, Twitter-ified entertainment version of YT.
All of these apps are just a gigantic waste of time, and proven to be highly manipulative and emotionally draining. I've managed to avoid all of them, including FB which I only keep to message family members and friends.
The fact that normally astute, rational, intelligent individuals find themselves mindlessly clicking through games or video apps goes to show how addictive and manipulative these apps are. Some of my friends realize this, but they still waste time on them as if they cannot stop. It's sad. The top comment is correct, it's a modern/high-tech addictive substance.
Those applications will be a great waste of time, but they are there to solve the problem behind all social media: loneliness and seeking care.
You can distract your mind with other things for a while, but sooner or later you will fall back on social networks, unless you stop being alone or have enough attention.
I think that living beings do not know how to survive alone, so being alone is something bad biologically and arouses something in us that makes us feel bad ... call it "loneliness" or whatever you want, but that thing kills you if you stay alone
I think that this level of analysis is really essential. It's not enough to say that something is addictive, we need to ask why.
Going one step further, I think that when social media came on the scene society in general was already fairly isolated and looking for some type of connection. Social media offered a quick fix, but frankly exacerbated the issue. It is a really vicious cycle. It feels even harder to connect to the real world around us nowadays.
I appreciate it, it really is something worth investigating because it is a problem that affects the entire planet basically (looking at the amount of active users that social media have).
The most fundamental questions I could find are:
Loneliness occurs only in logical intelligent beings or also in animals?
Loneliness is something created by our mind or is it something physical like the lack of a resource such as water, food, air? (maybe some of our organs release some harmful chemical when we are alone for a long time, I don't know, something similar to adrenaline)
How long is the maximum time that a person spent alone and what symptoms did he present? (This could guide us if loneliness causes physical damage)
If loneliness does not cause physical damage, then do we do the damage ourselves? Why? Perhaps our sexual reproduction cycle is related to this? But then, Why do the elderly also suffer from loneliness if they have already passed their reproductive stage? And what about children?...
But the fundamental question:
Can someone survive alone? If the answer is yes, I immediately leave my city and go to live in the forest, it is not a joke.
Humans are uniquely social creatures. There are other animals that tend to congregate in packs or hives or whatever due to evolutionary pressures, but I don't think they experience loneliness in the ways humans do.
Just look at what happens in solitary confinement. It literally drives inmates mad (and yes there is a bit of a confounding variable of this taking place in a prison, but the general principle still applies).
We have the phrase "No man is an island" for a reason. Although I'm sure you can always find exceptions, humans generally do not well without other humans. We have evolved to be in groups. The need for others is not quite as fundamental as the need for food and general physical safety, but it is not more than a step away. This is who we are as humans.
The modern world doesn't seem well equipped to address this need. We've lost most of our 3rd places, the youth in most developed countries face crushing economic circumstances, and our world feels more disconnected than ever.
Microsoft Launcher for Android comes with a screen-time usage widget that takes the place of a normal app icon... After a few days I was amazed that what felt like "small looks" and "short breaks" on my phone throughout the day added up to 1-2+ hours of screen time.
On the plus side I figured this could be steered into spaced-repetition flashcards for learning new stuff, but it's tough not to take a whiff of that social media crack isn't it.
I figure there's going to be a big market for things like tech-free resorts and curing device addictions once Gen-Z makes it to their 30s. They have unfortunately come out of the womb with a cell-phone in hand and will likely have a much tougher time being freed from the separation anxiety.
> Maybe this is where TikTok has succeeded: short, snappy, quickly accessed videos
I think this is precisely backwards. Teens like video apps because they have time to sit around watching videos. Adults gravitate towards text and images because they require less of a time commitment.
I’ve been getting back into electronic music production and there’s a growing group of people who previously used ableton, logic, etc that are moving to pure hardware production (it’s called Dawless) to reduce screen time. Many are software engineers or work a day job at a tech company.
Some really good points. Does anyone have a good explanation for why Chinese startups seem to have mastered build AI-centric apps while American startups (and large companies) lag behind?
Edit: Want to rephrase this to avoid promoting nationalism. Why has ByteDance been so successful? TikTok / Douyin and Toutiao are both really big hits, Facebook hasn't had a comparable ground-up hit despite having top-notch ML engineers.
Big US companies who have troves of user data usually have pretty strict policies about not just sticking it all through arbitrary ML pipelines for user privacy reasons.
Small US companies don't have access to enough data.
Companies in China have both lots of user data (1B+ internet users), and no privacy concerns about running ML experiments on that data (and observing user behaviour till they find success).
Hence, China will win the next wave of ML-powered social apps.
Yeah, I have seen firsthand how paranoid big US companies are about doing anything with personal data specially media which is a good thing for users. This really slows down even simple analysis where you were looking at even a Yes/No output and makes some features impossible/hard.
But they are competing with companies now which don't have the same ideological issues.
Free trade doesn't work between countries with different value systems, the values will be exploited as a weakness. Same applies with labor and environmental standards.
This is not even remotely true, I once worked at a team in a company which aggresively run user segregation and send marketing emails based on it, then they collect click data to curate more effective emails
IMO, it's likely that Bytedance is just as exceptional in its effective use of AI in China as it is in the US. IOW, ask why Bytedance is special, not why "Chinese startups" are special.
edit: and Newsdog, from the end of the article. My opinion is looking shaky.
I predict Chinese tech companies will offer wages equal to American tech companies for foreign workers in under a decade. Tech companies are really going to start feeling pressure in the coming years, and I know headlines will be full of "Nooooooo China can't possibly do this! Their economy is just a bubble!" type stuff. Just like we've been seeing since the early 2000s regarding manufacturing and the alleged fake cities and housing that supposedly "propped up" the economy.
America has gotten way too comfy with the idea that it's number 1 and forgotten that it's not an intrinsic role given to it, but something it had to work for. It's starting to look a little rough.
Very minor correction: you probably mean "complacency" not "complacement". And I do agree to an extent; from where I am standing the American software industry feels a bit bloated/stagnant/wasteful/some word I can't think of that covers all three.
This reminds me a recent story in china: senior ms employees complaint against newly hired Huawei employees, who voluntarily worked overtime, and even showed off this to other senior ms employees.
If I had to take a guess, Asia has always focused more on math in education than the US. Given that AI/machine learning is a lot of math it makes sense (they would have a larger talent pool for building the algorithms), but that's just one guess...
A lot of those are employed by US based companies and US still can outpay companies in RoW. The only thing limiting is access to H1B visas, so I doubt talent pool is the cause here.
But I would argue that designing an algorithm that appeals to the human psyche in the way that Bytedance as done requires more than math skills. Designing the TikTok "For You Page" is not a pure ML problem, its a people problem that is being solved with ML.
Personally I felt the appeal of TikTok is that the design is ML-centric - clean buttons, very clear signal, not a bunch of mixed feedback signals like in other apps. Everyone on board seems to understand the importance of the underlying ranking algorithm
It's not just AI, every change is an opportunity China can grasp. They got enough men, money, and are motivated to compete in the market. If nothing is changing, it would be very hard to challenge current monopolies, but we're living in a world that is rapidly changing.
An example is the electric vehicle. Though EV cannot replace traditional vehicles at a full scale right now, the traditional vehicle industry is not very efficient, things are not standardized or intentionally walled by monopolies. As for EV, conceptually it should be simpler, more straightforward, and more standardized, then companies can easily prototyping and mass-producing EV on a really large scale - that's what China good at, what they're not good at is they don't have recognizable branding, but there are not too many EV brandings as traditional vehicle brandings like Daimler or VW. Both government and companies see this as a great opportunity to lead these market so it's been greatly promoted.
The semiconductor industry is another field that China may want to compete in the future. Traditionally, Intel is pretty much non-challengable. However, since mobile become dominant, and Apple started to get rid of X86 and move to Arm, there might be a big change in the future. If operating systems and software are willing to support Arm, it would create yet another chance for China to participate in the competition.
I think he might be referring to companies like SenseTime which were in fields like image/video recognition. I think for fields like this there is a cultural barrier which prevents companies like these from being successful in US.
Say, if FB starts using its AI chops to build smart video analysis tools which can be used by law enforcement, you would probably have employee mutiny at your hands.
I was seeing a Vice video on the surveillance technologies the companies are building in China where the engineer building it was so excited to show the technology he had built not thinking about how invasively it tracks everything, keeps history etc. I would just call it a cultural gap.
You also have face recognition used in law enforcement in Britain too, though. And from top of my head, Britain was the first country to mass roll out CCTV system as well.
But that hasn't been replicated in most Western nations. This went to court and you had a lot of scrutiny on this.
In PRC, because of cultural differences I think most people accept the crime safety net you get over personal freedom restrictions and you can't really meaningfully challenge any such move even if you wanted to. Anyway, it is the same in Singapore and people seem happy with it despite being exposed to all the Western culture too, so I think it is a cultural thing.
The thing that British were the first to roll out this but we haven't seen any advanced analysis stuff out in public after it kind of shows the apprehensiveness around it.
It's true that the lack of awareness of privacy is pretty prevalent even in industry. Hence the ease of obtaining large amount of highly curated data. But it is also true that these details are used as material for sensationalist journalism. Sometimes I can tell clearly (by understanding what they speak) the interviewees were so innocently excited without knowing how they are cut into videos. But I could be biased too.
Yeah, I don't doubt it. It could very well have been edited to look like that, either for views or sensationalism. Here is the video if you want to see: https://youtu.be/CLo3e1Pak-Y
ByteDance and iFlytek have stood out to me. I saw iFlytek's universal translator at the airport one time and it was really impressive. There's also a number of examples in Kai-Fu Lee's book "AI Superpowers" - I guess that's the book that put this thought in my head in the first place
Speaking entirely anecdotally, I suspect having a bunch of people working on an ML algorithm actually does more harm than good. It's more important that everyone in the product stack is on the same page about the point.
The Facebook Newsfeed UI, for example, has to balance so many different signals. Compare that with TikTok's UI, which is very efficient at collecting a clear reinforcement signal and only has to deal with one homogenous kind of data. It's like the entire TikTok team, not just the data scientists, focused in on doing ML really well.
I'm really impressed and kind of scared whenever I use TikTok. It really does feel like a whole different level of ML-powered addictiveness, designed from the ground up rather than having the ML part added on.
this doesn’t surprise me at all. I work at a consumer company and we use neural networks to personalize feeds. Thousands of features feed in and each member gets a different feed. It doesn’t take much / long to personalize.
What I am surprised by is that YouTube or others dont use as effectively. Neural networks are very well known. or, is there something “next level” that TikTok is using that isn’t well known?
Also worth calling out that Netflix also used to use personalized recommendation engines, but eventually found that “top in the US” won out, which I found fascinating. If one person loves action movies for example, wouldn’t they find a list of those more appealing than a generic list of top 10? I sometimes get curious about top 10 but rarely actually watch them myself
My gut instinct is that Netflix can't use the personalized algorithmic approach that TikTok succeeds with because Netflix has to pay dearly for its content, where TikTok does not. Because of the cost structure of licensing, Netflix cannot afford to have the diversity of content that TikTok's user-generated approach enables. A small content library makes it impossible to build a meaningfully personalized feed.
It's also much harder to tell why somebody liked a 2h movie, vs a 15 second clip. The 15 second clip only has so many properties, where as there's millions of reasons I might like one movie but not a similar one. Also, as far as Netflix, id rather see more diversity, and not see the same movie made over and over again. I would wager TikTok viewers are more willing to watch repetitive things play out.
This is not as difficult to understand as it might sound, Netflix can only run recommendation based on the series its audience has watched, and you can only watch so many series in a week. Whereas for 15 seconds clips, the engine get feed hundred if not thousands times more data it would on netflix data. so
I guess TikTok has taken the quote "users don't know what they want" to next level. FB, YT, Twitter, Instagram are trying to use the labels/tags/likes/network provided by user while TikTok is using user's interactions to categorize user and recommend the content which the user himself didn't even knew he/she liked.
The article didn't have many details about the "For You Page feed algorithm". Any guesses as to how it analyzes a video, and which properties it looks at?
Yeah I'm imagining a mix of facial features, audio/music metadata, and some kind of collaborative filtering between viewers and creators. The vast majority of feeds use at least geography based personalization to give you content in a familiar language, too.
Latent visual features are likely a strong component. I imagine if you created a new account and started watching content with only blond people in it, the ranking algorithm would pretty quickly start showing you only blond people.
> But in the reverse direction, America has been almost as impenetrable to Chinese companies because of what might be though of as America’s cultural firewall
Why would they even try? You've got a nice big domestic tech ecosystem which would not have existed without protectionism. Most of these products aren't competitive at all. Nothing to do with culture, same reason Canada, UK etc aren't known for big tech successes.
Musical.ly is unusual in that they did actually work on an original idea and decided to launch the product in America where it took off first. Ended up not playing the China game early on.
> With it, a massive team made up mostly by people who’ve never left China, and many who never will, grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets they’d never experienced firsthand. To a cultural determinist like myself, that feels like black magic.
Pretty much every big American tech company does that. Nothing notable about this.
> I don’t think the Chinese product teams I’ve met in recent years in China are much further ahead than the ones I met in 2011 when it comes to understanding foreign cultures like America. But what the Bytedance algorithm did was it abstracted that problem away.
Understanding in what way? You work on a product and you optimize it for your users. If you work in a 100% domestically focused ecosystem obviously you'll design your products a little differently. What happened here is a Chinese company was for a change actually working on a product with a global userbase and they had to make them happy.
The whole thing is borderline insulting to the founders.
For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called “marketplace of ideas,” the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the resulting culture wars. Until they have some real substantial ideas and incentives to take on the costly task of mediating between strangers who disagree with each other, they’re better off sorting those people apart. The only types of people who enjoy being thrown into a gladiatorial online arena together with those they disagree with seem to be trolls, who benefit asymmetrically from the resultant violence.
This seems to contradict what has been said about Facebook exploiting users's attraction to divisiveness and polarization. See [1] and [2].
I'm not sure it's as much of a contradiction as you think it is. Noting "It manifests itself in the declining visit and posting frequency on Facebook across many cohorts", I find it entirely plausible that feeding the trolls yielded short term lift in target metrics at the expense of (much harder to measure and correctly attribute) long-term attrition of non-troll users. That hypothesis certainly fits the popular perception that FB is dying/dead. It somewhat fits my personal experience: I fairly aggressively pruned my news feed of any political content, which seems to have kept away the trolling, but the personal content that I wanted has dried up and my feed is now mostly ads and generic "recommended" clickbait. Why bother visiting?
"On my way in and out of this office, just one of several Bytedance spaces all across the city, I gawked at hundreds of workers sitting side by side in row after row in the open floorplan. It resembled what I’d seen at tech giants like Facebook in the U.S., but even denser."
--
As much as US devs whine about open offices, it could be worse.
I run Office Snapshots (first link) and hadn't seen the faux ceiling you linked to -- definitely interesting.
@kakkun My guess is that it would be limit direct sunlight, though if that were the case, a shade higher up might look better.
I do remember someone telling me that if you go into a Costco food court people often gravitate to the tables with an umbrella on them even though they are indoors. Their theory was that people do like to have something over their heads in such a big warehouse-size space.
What's the purpose of the faux ceiling? I would have hoped the large expansive space and glass ceiling would be used to help alleviate feelings of claustrophobia.
To pick up on one point from the (fascinating) article:
> In the other direction, the U.S. hasn’t made a huge dent in China. Obviously, the Great Firewall played a huge role in keeping a lot of U.S. companies out of the Chinese market, but in the few cases where a U.S. company got a crack at the Chinese market, like Uber China, the results were mixed.
I'm genuinely curious to know which non-Chinese apps/services have managed to establish themselves in China. I feel like an argument could be made for LinkedIn... Are there obvious ones I'm missing?
How will showing people short video clips to create a drug like drip of enjoyable chemical reactions in the brain progress the species?
> (and yes, one feed that contained the thirst trap photos of attractive Indian girls in rather suggestive outfits standing under things like waterfalls; some parts of culture are universal).
Doesn’t sound like any version of progress that I would get excited about.
What's the long term end goal for society? I think one feature of such a society would be unlimited entertainment available for anyone, which TikTok provides.
I think with most work automated away humans should mostly entertain themselves in person. Art should be increasing interactive as everyone has time to level up beyond passive audience.
> How will showing people short video clips to create a drug like drip of enjoyable chemical reactions in the brain progress the species?
Possibly (pure speculation here): if you carefully observe, at massive scale, how a system [1] behaves, it may provide some insights into how it is implemented. And based on those learnings, iteratively improve how the platform feeds tests and analyzes responses to gain deeper understanding of the system over time.
[1] In this case, "the system" consists of individual human minds, as well as the overall network of minds.
FB, TWTR, GOOG, INSTA, everyone switched from timeline to personal recommendation engines and TikTok is just doing it so much better. Where will things be in 5, 10, 50 years? Terrifying and exciting.
Do these tech companies sit on research to suggest that these algorithms can induce behavior-changing tactics through trial-and-error? Will they all have their tobacco-causes-cancer moment?
Old-Age Fear: YouTube algorithm sending people down the conspiracy rabbit hole
New-Age Fear (Hyper-Efficient): TikTok secretly radicalizing individual in X?
I've been re-reading Infinite Jest recently and it is amazing how prescient David Foster Wallace seems. The deep philosophical question - does American individualism mean anything in a world where the average person cannot be expected to delay gratification?
>> research to suggest that these algorithms can induce behavior-changing tactics through trial-and-error?
Cambridge Analytica certainly had that research. Media campaigns are no longer about "getting the word out", projecting an idea and hoping it sticks. Modern campaigns are about changing a narrative, moving individuals from one opinion to another through whatever means works best for that individual. I cannot see how Facebook wouldn't be studying this.
Very insightful read. Loved the part describing TikTok's algorithm as essentially a zero friction, global 'market maker' for content producers and consumers. Really clicked with me.
Eugene mentions that the algorithm is the one that built this latent interest graph and this algorithm itself is worth a lot of money. Given that most personalization is using ML/Deep Learning and various video features like scene descriptions, object identification in each scene etc, Is it really that proprietary to warrant this level of premium. Once the awareness of interest graph could be built to this level of efficiency using usual techniques, Is the algorithm and approach exclusive to TikTok ?
Very interesting read about why TikTok is succeeding. It makes me more curious about how the TikTok curation algorithm works!
I appreciate the comparison of TikTok to other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, but I am surprised there is no discussion about Reddit? Reddit is interesting in that people have to follow topics/communities in the form of subreddits, so it only works if the user puts in the effort to find communities to subscribe to. Maybe Reddit could also benefit from a better curation algorithm.
Am I the only one not hooked on TikTok? It’s just a lot of good looking people repeating similar jokes. Maybe their algorithm haven’t figured me out yet.
The article mentions that TikTok owes a lot of its early traction to its predecessor, musical.ly. but there's no mention of how/whether musical.ly got license for their lip sync music.
Was the success of musical.ly (and by some large extension, TikTok) based on the difficult-to-stop (because China) pirating of music?
Musical.ly did? How did they negotiate that license, I wonder?
Let me put it another way then: Is the success of musical.ly and its successor TikTok really about somehow getting licensed music on a platform out the gate? And the sorting hat is just a good refinement that wouldn't have a chance to exist without the licensing?
Interesting article in NYTimes a few minutes ago that several Trump advisers had to talk him into the MicroSoft compromise just before he was to sign the banning order. The advisors were horrified they'd lose an angry generation of new voters. In a sense this now a win-win for the administration: they punish China a little bit and dont overly alienate young voters.
Fantastic read. Time for Ben of Stratechery to pass the baton :p - I'm assuming Eugene is now going to get a gazillion messages of employment or consulting requests at the aforementioned FAANG companies to help steer the direction of their tiktok ambitions.
Instead of being amazed that TikTok beat juggernauts, maybe it should be reframed that they beat companies that have terrible products.
Sine we're talking about niches and customized feeds, let's look at reddit. My god is the reddit app absolutely horrendous. It's so bad I use the web app in desktop mode because other forms have terrible UX. They just don't care.
Or let's talk about another site that was mentioned: youtube. It's like Google with all their money, doesn't really care to spend real money on trying to solve problems. If they dumped something like 100-200 million into better community outreach, and actual going in and tagging videos, and dealing with content, the service would be so much better. Instead, they made their money on search, and now it's spinning it's wheels trying to find clever algorithms to solve problems.
We knew there was a market for an app that lets you easily create, edit and upload videos. Vine proved the formula worked. TikTok stepped in and filled the void.
The simpler answer is TikTok paid an ample Chinese labor force to watch and heart U.S. videos. This gives the users a nice dopamine rush and brings them back. It was obvious by the number of likes and comments very dumb videos would have.
that's just plain wrong. if you even used tiktok, you'll understand how truly frighteningly powerful their algorithm is at finding exactly the kind of content you want to watch. i was never the kind of person to scroll my phone right before sleeping, but somehow i found myself doing that these days on tiktok, mindlessly just swiping up over and over again, not able to stop because almost every video seems to appeal precisely to my taste, even in the weird humor stuff.
Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture.
This is important to the article's thesis. At least part of the early insight into the US market comes from the founders living and working in the US.