
TikTok and the Sorting Hat - hardmaru
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat
======
mgraczyk
> 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.

~~~
dirtyid
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.

~~~
ontifica
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.

~~~
dirtyid
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.

~~~
rfoo
> 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?

~~~
dirtyid
There's a 2018 Sinicia episode for with Rogier Creemers who did first summary
of systems: [https://supchina.com/podcast/mythbusting-chinas-social-
credi...](https://supchina.com/podcast/mythbusting-chinas-social-credit-
system/)

A 2019 compilation of experts: [http://socialcredit.triviumchina.com/what-is-
social-credit/k...](http://socialcredit.triviumchina.com/what-is-social-
credit/key-sources-experts/)

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.

------
Firebrand
>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.

~~~
tmpz22
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.

~~~
neixidbeksoxyd
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.

~~~
tmpz22
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.

------
titanomachy
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.

~~~
Noumenon72
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.

~~~
newen
Smell-o-vision. The next revolution in smartphone technology!

------
chvid
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.

~~~
sandworm101
>> 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.

[https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-
users-v...](https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-users-videos-
suppressed.html)

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-
tr...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tried-to-
filter-out-videos-from-ugly-poor-or-disabled-users)

~~~
quicklime
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?

~~~
dfxm12
_They have fewer coronavirus cases only because Chinese people are docile,
obedient sheeple who hate freedom_

Who made this argument?

~~~
quicklime
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.

~~~
jaybeeayyy
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.

~~~
sandworm101
>> poor/dirty people sell exotic meats

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.

~~~
vkou
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.

~~~
mrkramer
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.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
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.

------
WhompingWindows
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.

~~~
zozin
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.

~~~
Avtomatk
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

~~~
tengu20
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.

~~~
Avtomatk
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.

~~~
tengu20
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.

------
codekansas
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.

~~~
matz1
Elon musk recently said China rocks and the US has become more entitled and
full of complacement.

I kind a have to agree, even my company starting to shift a lot of development
work to team in china. Their output and hard work has been amazing.

~~~
filleduchaos
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.

~~~
alloai
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.

------
xivzgrev
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

~~~
ry_co
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.

~~~
basch
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.

~~~
beaunative
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

------
praveen9920
Nice read.

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.

------
auganov
> 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.

------
kangnkodos
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?

~~~
whlr
Don’t know much about this, but I would have thought TikTok relies on the
watch patterns of its viewers, rather than direct video analysis.

------
yamrzou
_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].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313007)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507)

~~~
Nacraile
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?

------
reedwolf
"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.

~~~
Cactus2018
Found photos of Bytedance's open office:

empty: [https://officesnapshots.com/2016/07/13/bytedance-offices-
bei...](https://officesnapshots.com/2016/07/13/bytedance-offices-beijing/)

full of staff: [https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-04-22/bytedance-drops-
payw...](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-04-22/bytedance-drops-paywall-for-
novels-on-its-toutiao-app-101545886.html)

with a faux ceiling: [https://www.livemint.com/companies/start-ups/tiktok-
parent-e...](https://www.livemint.com/companies/start-ups/tiktok-parent-
eyeing-content-startup-deals-in-big-push-into-india-1563301051925.html)

~~~
stevesearer
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.

------
melonkidney
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?

~~~
est
microsoft, bing, azure. skype, linkedin, z.cn, kindle, aws china, zoom,
android, wework.

------
bsoist
Very interesting. We might make real progress as a species if we can leverage
this more generally as a society.

Also, I expect the "machines" to disrupt the film industry in a very similar
way.

~~~
lotsofpulp
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.

~~~
zerowangtwo
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.

~~~
Ericson2314
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.

------
gazelleeatslion
Modern day tobacco. 100% unregulated addiction.

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?

The big question strikes: "what is free will?"

Amazing read

~~~
sandworm101
>> 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.

~~~
fsociety
Cambridge Analytica was both snake-oil and a wake up call. A sign of where
things could go if we don’t smarten up soon.

------
corford
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.

------
smaddali
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 ?

Awesome Insights from Eugene !!

------
tmabraham
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.

------
webninja
The author of this article mentions that the TikTok algorithm alone is worth
30B. One TikTok user claims to have figured it out.

1 rewatch = 6 points

1 completion = 5 points

Share = 3 points

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Full video: [https://vm.tiktok.com/Jjv2cXC/](https://vm.tiktok.com/Jjv2cXC/)

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m3kw9
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.

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creeble
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?

I now unleash the piracy-is-not-theft dogs...

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bigpumpkin
They used licensed music

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creeble
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?

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intended
Does this dodge the problem of political speech ?

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082349872349872
How much sorting needs to be done? I'd guess fewer than 20 questions worth.

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peter303
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.

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taylorhou
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.

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preommr
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.

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angel_j
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.

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greeniron
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.

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angel_j
Wow I get downvoted to make room for "it's magic".

