
Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance - ston3r
https://factordaily.com/anatomy-of-tik-tok-the-viral-video-app-from-bytedance/
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kev6168
Like eating potato chips, watching the videos on Douyin (Tik Tok) can become a
non-stop action because it's a super convenient low-effort pleasurable thing
to do, it's faster than fast food while lying on the sofa.

The app opens in sub-second and then starts playing a video right away, the
video is also selected to conform to your previous likings. Or I also like to
say it's the mobile phone era's bubble gums, a source of endless simple
pleasure. Of course there are also many videos providing valuable educational
content.

From my own experience, I feel Douyin has enforced pretty strict policies
regarding what video are acceptable. A while ago I submitted a video about
early day internet success stories such as eBay/PlentyOfFish/etc., it was
rejected repeatedly. No reasons were given and I didn't bother to ask. I
suspect it's because I had words "rich"/"money"/"quick success" in the
description. You often hear other people's complaints in their videos, such as
"My last one was deleted by Douyin and I don't know why." Anyway, it's just my
one anecdote.

~~~
nielsbot
I think the analogy extends in other ways too: too many chips are bad for you
and leave you feeling yucky... Same is true for video consumption? I just
think people should be careful. :)

~~~
kev6168
That indeed was what in my mind. For viewers it can be a huge time waste. I
lost many nights' sleep watching kittens, puppies or comedy videos, often from
11pm until 5am, in my early Douyin days. The platform kept giving me stuff
from the same category again and again. There was also the suspense that you
wish to know what the next video would be like. But the next day I felt
terrible. Nowadays I don't open Douyin/Tik Tok after getting on bed.

On the other hand, this form (of convenience and simple pleasure) matches our
basic desire, imo. So maybe it will continue to develop and expand.

I should say Douyin/Tik Tok is also great for people to express themselves, to
create artistic content, to provide valuable content. So potato chip or bubble
gum are naturally not very accurate descriptions.

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stephengillie
This is a product-level dissection of what makes the app tick, not a technical
discussion. The article discusses integration with other social networks, but
doesn't discuss tech stack or research.

~~~
40acres
I'm actually a lot more interested in the product decisions than the tech
stack. I wish there more product deep dives on HN.

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diafygi
_dons tinfoil hat_

Does anyone else find the jittery multicolored icon suspicious? It seems like
it's begging to be used as a fingerprint to identify from which phone a video
was recorded. It basically hides surveillance in plain site, and the
fingerprint survives sharing/re-encoding.

~~~
Cthulhu_
You can see this one at least; there's a load of fingerprinting algorithms out
there that don't rely on something plainly visible.

Instead it's a very effective (IMO) watermark that draws the attention to the
app and it was probably one of the reasons why it's so popular. I've seen it
on Reddit a few times going 'wtf is that?'. Think of it like the modern-day's
"Unregistered HyperCam 2".

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geoah
I've been seeing this weird multicolored icon all around in imgur and reddit
for some time now, but I never knew it was Bytedance (or even knew this
company existed.) Never cared enough to do a reverse image search but it
always amazed me that it was all over the place.

~~~
reaperducer
To give you an idea of how addicting this app can be for teens and tweens,
kids in Hong Kong are risking their lives for likes:

[https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-
kong/community/article/214690...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-
kong/community/article/2146904/i-risked-my-life-please-mobile-app-tik-tok-has-
hong-kong)

Another article about how children don't understand the implications of
putting their personal information in this app:

[https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-
kong/education/article/214684...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-
kong/education/article/2146840/hong-kong-children-expose-their-identities-
thoughts-and)

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taneq
So basically this is the new Vine?

~~~
tantalor
I wouldn't call it "new".

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k-ian
oh hey, I can download this app in the US app store now. that's a pretty
recent change

~~~
jasonjayr
They acquired Music.ly's users into their app, which I think kick-started
their non-China userbase ...

~~~
stephengillie
The first paragraph of the article confirms:

> _Edit Notes: Chinese app company Bytedance acquired Musical.ly for nearly $1
> billion in November 2017. Last week, it shut down Musical.ly and migrated
> all its users and content to Tik Tok, another short video app it owns.
> Musical.ly was incredibly popular in India with over 15 million users in the
> country. With the migration, Bytedance has created a large user base in the
> country._

~~~
jasonjayr
Yes noted. -- I commented first, then read the article, sorry!

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burger_moon
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
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmphkNDosg)

~~~
jackvalentine
Can you please explain it yourself because flicking through that 12 minute
video he just seems to be making fun of it.

