Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#41

Post by toephu2 »

huangc10 wrote: post #28

How can we trust any of the analytics coming out of mainland China? Can you be 100% positive that Toutiao is not controlled by the Chinese government? They can easily funnel all internet traffic to Toutiao and control it, and use it to their advantage. Curate the news to whatever way they want. Toutiao is a privately owned company held in Beijing. Am I being paranoid? They can claim machine learning (and they probabl…

It's public knowledge in China that all tech giants are in bed with the government. Considering Toutiao is one of the fastest growing media companies in China, you can be sure they too will bend to the will of the government at a moment's notice.

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#42

Post by toephu2 »

komali2 wrote: post #14

Checked out Toutiao's website, I think registering if you don't speak Chinese is nearly impossible - google translate doesn't seem to work on the login page. You can copy/paste each string into google translate individually, if you're patient enough ;)

Hint: it's not aimed towards non-Chinese speakers...yet

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#43

Post by s17n »

anuh wrote: post #2

Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.

You talk here about creating an "addictive" product. People in the industry usually use the euphemism "engagement" rather than "addiction" but either way, do you think that this type of product will eventually be treated by society the way cigarettes are now?

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#44

Post by flyingaragogue »

First of all, I wouldn't consider Toutiao content to be "quality content", as the article says. It's still pretty much all "soft news". Secondly, this 100% engagement-driven algorism of content recommendation doesn't serve to inform readers in any meaningful way, as a proper News app should do. But rather, it just makes ppl keep clicking and wasting their time.

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#45

Post by solaarphunk »

dashtoanother wrote: post #36
anuh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t convince you to be a believer :) That is totally up to you!

Can you go home at the end of the day, look into your kid's eyes, and say 'mommy made a difference today, helping a dictatorship government control its own people, and spread its controlling message, eventually to the world'?

Perhaps to your surprise, many people in China are okay with certain freedom tradeoffs vs. improvements in other areas of quality of life. Its not an issue that you can easily simplify the more you familiarize yourself with it.

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#46

Post by slackoverflower »

joe_the_user wrote: post #24

TL;DR; Does engagement equal success? I have an account on Youtube that I used for only a specific interest. Youtube's suggestions are pretty bad. And they've declined in quality. And Youtube makes a strong effort to selling me mainstream content that I uniformly reject. And I can find better recommendations on suggested videos fitting my interest than I find on the Youtube landing for my account. And I'd be for Yout…

Very much disagree. Youtube's suggestion algorithm are improved incredibly over the years. It is increasingly surfacing content that I find interesting. I spend much more time on Youtube nowadays, easy more time than Facebook. I regularly just go to Youtube.com landing page to see what it wants to show me and always shows great quality content. Youtube has done an amazing job with their algorithms, and its showing.

Check out this article: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-b...

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#48

Post by bllguo »

I'm sure there's research on this already, but just a thought - it seems to me like it would be easier to do NLP on Chinese, vs English. (I speak both). Much easier to recognize the author's meaning in Chinese characters, and more often than not people use the same words to describe something.. vs. the frankly disgusting mess that is English. Misspellings abound, the same words can mean all kinds of things, grepping for strings is hard because sequences of letters aren't unique, etc.

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#49

Post by forapurpose »

solaarphunk wrote: post #45
dashtoanother wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you go home at the end of the day, look into your kid's eyes, and say 'mommy made a difference today, helping a dictatorship government control its own people, and spread its controlling message, eventually to the world'?

Perhaps to your surprise, many people in China are okay with certain freedom tradeoffs vs. improvements in other areas of quality of life. Its not an issue that you can easily simplify the more you familiarize yourself with it.

I hear this argument a lot, but:

1: If so many people are ok with it, then why not take a vote? If they are ok with it, they will vote for the current government. If they are not ok, then this argument is false and the current government should be voted out of office. Either way, a vote is good for China.

2: If the citizens are ok with it, then why does the government have to censor criticism and non-government ideas, run massive propaganda operations on their own citizens, jail dissenters, and oppress Tibet and Xinjiang? How do you know if the citizens are ok with it?

3: Parts of China that do have democracy and human rights, Taiwan and Hong Kong, seem to like those things very much - it's not a popular idea in those regions, or even an idea at all, to trade in democracy and human rights for the mainland's political system; no Taiwanese candidate makes that pitch to the voters! Also, people in Taiwan and Hong Kong are far more prosperous per capita than those on the mainland (I'm excluding Hong Kong from the "mainland" in this case.)

> certain freedom tradeoffs vs. improvements in other areas of quality of life.

It's not a tradeoff, it's just a needless sacrifice. All the wealthiest, most secure nations it the world have democracy and human rights. It's not a Western thing; that includes the wealthiest regions of China, Japan, South Korea, etc. What is the Communist dictatorship providing in this tradeoff?

> Its not an issue that you can easily simplify

'It's complicated' is not an answer, it's the avoidance of one.

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#50

Post by chenster »

nullnilvoid wrote: post #10

As an avid user of Toutiao, I am super impressed by Toutiao. It is super easy to use and shows the content I am mostly interested in. I use it daily to get information. I am a little bit worried that I would not get broad views if Toutiao only shows articles I am interested in.

Fliboard's recommendation engine is really good, I would say it has already solved the content discovery and recommendation piece of the puzzle. The key is to keep us engaged early on and let them keep using the product.

The main differentiator is the Toutiao is able to leverage AI to write good grammar article ... in Chinese when there aren't enough content already. The China has SO MUCH data required for deep learning due to its population and omnipresent of mobile devices. Other countries just couldn't compete.

Post reply on HN