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.
