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The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

blog.ycombinator.com

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

#51

Post by chenster »

zmitri wrote: post #18
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.

I'm a little disappointed in this post given China's penchant to controlling news/media/content. I see how this could easily be manipulated into an extremely powerful propaganda tool - especially hiding behind a guise of "algorithms" are doing all the work - and yet it is not mentioned at all in the post. We have already seen how content systems like Facebook, Google, and Twitter can be manipulated via botnets, but w…

All media are controlled by the government in China, not just Toutian. It certainly can be manipulated easily for propaganda. However, it is now a common problem even for a company like the Facebook's fake news problem.

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

#52

Post by gkanai »

nobahashi wrote: post #15

Hi Anu, 1.) Does the machine learning algorithm behind toutiao abide by the censorship effort from Beijing? For example, are any of the contents about the disappearance of the wife of the nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobao censored? 2.) What happens when the Chinese government demand board seats, much like Tencent and Alibaba? Or is toutiao already working with the Chinese government closely? 3.) Do you know whether or n…

> Or is toutiao already working with the Chinese government closely?

Every Chinese social media app/company has to follow the Chinese censorship rules, so yes. Toutiao has an army of censors working to censor the content.

https://www.reuters.com/article/china-congress-censorship/te...

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

#53

Post by gkanai »

zmitri wrote: post #18
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.

I'm a little disappointed in this post given China's penchant to controlling news/media/content. I see how this could easily be manipulated into an extremely powerful propaganda tool - especially hiding behind a guise of "algorithms" are doing all the work - and yet it is not mentioned at all in the post. We have already seen how content systems like Facebook, Google, and Twitter can be manipulated via botnets, but w…

https://www.reuters.com/article/china-congress-censorship/te...

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

#54

Post by whooshee »

nobahashi wrote: post #15

Hi Anu, 1.) Does the machine learning algorithm behind toutiao abide by the censorship effort from Beijing? For example, are any of the contents about the disappearance of the wife of the nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobao censored? 2.) What happens when the Chinese government demand board seats, much like Tencent and Alibaba? Or is toutiao already working with the Chinese government closely? 3.) Do you know whether or n…

Nobel Peace Prize is more political and ideological than any other Nobel Prizes. I don't consider it to be a 100% valid one. Not like academic ones where people send proofs. And that guy is named Liu XiaoBo not XiaoBao. His wife is fine, and there are no reasons to do anything about his family.

Toutiao is just another company who runs for profits. Profits are focused. I don't see its popularity outside China even in East Asia.

You may worry more about your own right-wing Indian government.

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

#57

Post by slackingoff2017 »

whooshee wrote: post #56

Huh, More time-killing than social media. Feeding people content that they like. Putting them in the bubbles and reap the profits. Much of the Internet has been on this track for years. Last year's election fully testified how much all of this kind of media can do.

Reminds me of this https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...

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

#58

Post by yorwba »

bllguo wrote: post #48

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…

Do you speak Chinese? NLP for Chinese comes with it's own set of challenges.

Because word boundaries aren't marked, you need word segmentation, which requires understanding in lots of cases. (Can't tell where a word ends and the next one begins if you don't know what they mean.)

Many words have a literal meaning and a metaphorical one (e.g. 纠结 can mean both "tangled" and "confused").

Different synonyms being used for the same concept are common as well, especially when you contrast formal vs. informal writing.

Misspellings can happen too, where a character is substituted with a similar character that has the same pronunciation. Sometimes completely different characters are used as a kind of pun.

Grepping is less likely to yield false positives (unless you're looking for a single-character word that can appear in compounds), but there is no easy way to do fuzzy matching to account for misspelled words.

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

#59

Post by catnaroek »

forapurpose wrote: post #49
solaarphunk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trade, not democracy, brings prosperity.

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

#60

Post by drited »

indescions_2017 wrote: post #32

Toutiao is one of the names often bandied as a potential candidate for having a US-based IPO, alongside Best, Roku, CarGurus, and some 100+ other Chinese consumer internet unicorns ;) Your insightful analysis of Toutiao's AI depth is enough to tempt one to dip a toe should shares trade publicly. But the revenue growth (contextual ad based) is phenomenal as well. Any clues as to how they might seek to expand into paid…

Could you please link to the website of China's Cargurus that you mentioned? I would like to see which site you were speaking about because I follow Autohome and Bitauto.
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