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Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

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Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#21

Post by micro_cam »

TikTok’s parent co, bytedance, has multiple social video products in China. They have been genuinely investing in being good at serving and recommending video for a while.

If you search arxiv.org for bytedance you can see some of the work they have published. I’m sure there is lots more they haven’t.

I suspect a lot of learnings from other products went into the product design of tik tok as well in terms of how to balance exploiting a users knon interests with showing them novel stuff, how to give anything the chance to go viral etc.

Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#22

Post by kossTKR »

guptaneil wrote: post #8

I don’t have any unique insights into TikTok nor do I use the app, but TikTok has several product advantages over those other platforms: 1. They only have a queue of videos. That means there is one video playing and they know exactly what the next N videos are going to be, so they can start buffering them early 2. The video plays are high intent. If you launch TikTok, you are 100% going to watch videos. This is not t…

Regarding 3. I've seen tiktok on an iPad and the quality is surprisingly good. High res and no artifacts. People can already film 4k with their phones, and that's what's shared.

Also young people scroll for hours (and adults, the average age is above 25 afaik) so watch-time isn't less than on YT, probably even more.

Lastly but most importantly, many people scroll through a huge pile of videos before watching even 10 seconds of an "interesting one" before doing the same thing over and over again, so in effect you are buffering a lot more video than on YT.

They must have absolutely massive infrastructure.

Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#23

Post by super256 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #6

Remember Vines? As they say, "Good artists copy, great artists steal"... Being headquartered in a jurisdiction that doesn't care for intellectual property sure must be convenient.

> Being headquartered in a jurisdiction that doesn't care for intellectual property sure must be convenient.

Like… YouTube with their shorts?

A continuous, infinite scroll stream of $media is everything but an original invention, and most likely not protected by any IP law.

Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#24

Post by muzani »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #3

Disclaimer: speculation TikTok is a Chinese company. The source code is mostly written in China. I'd say that TikTok is the Chinese equivalent of a FAANG company. They get the talent because the fight is happening in the FAANG space, they are not there.

Most of the tech jobs are not in China: https://jobs.bytedance.com/en/position?category=670421586260...

Chinese FAANG is probably geared more towards hardware, things like Xiaomi and Huawei.

Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#26

Post by dan-robertson »

To write something obvious: companies generally don’t succeed or fail based on their technology. A good user experience is necessary for TikTok to do well but it doesn’t matter whether they achieve because of ‘good’ tech, whatever that is, or in spite of it.

I think there were a few things for the business where tech was important:

- being good at serving/storing videos

- the recommendation engine. There are two parts, one is taking user preferences as a strong signal (not a tech decision) and another is recommendation algorithms which produce this effect (I think they’re rote a paper that suggested things about how this worked)

- being an app people wanted to use (weakly tech but mostly not)

I think a some of the explosive growth came from the app having been iterated on a bunch in China first so it seemed more polished when it reached the west. But I could be pretty wrong there.

To answer the question about engineering talent:

- Chinese people will go to the US, get great educations at US universities, some get denied work visas or otherwise choose to return to China. TikTok can employ them in a less competitive labour market and not fight companies like Google which don’t operate in China.

Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#27

Post by muzani »

dbbk wrote: post #5

"It rarely buffers or fails to load" this is because the next 6 or so videos are known and buffered ahead of time. This isn't really the case on other sites.

There's a trick with Spotify, where they buffer a few seconds from expected next songs and load the rest once it picks which song is next. You can test this by cutting off internet, then pressing next song at the same time.

Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#28

Post by netsharc »

hot_gril wrote: post #16
dbbk wrote: post #5

"It rarely buffers or fails to load" this is because the next 6 or so videos are known and buffered ahead of time. This isn't really the case on other sites.

You load a feed on Twitter. It knows what videos are coming up. You open a page on Reddit, it knows what videos are in the first few pages.

But Twitter/Reddit don't know if you'll play the videos, meanwhile TikTok can assume you will, so can already fetch them from the server.

Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#29

Post by lofaszvanitt »

Here is your answer from a book called The American Trap:

Americans are very proud of their "process". ... Americans love their processes. In their jobs they rarely express their creativity. Conversely, they expend a lot of energy and time adhering to their processes.

Maybe?

Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?

#30

Post by PeterisP »

hot_gril wrote: post #14

People have answered about the inherent easiness of preloading videos. It's still a challenge. Users skip videos very frequently, right? And when you first open the app, it already has a video playing. Twitter's video player seems worse than it should be. Netflix has a harder job due to the quality, so I give them a pass. IIRC TikTok for a long time wasn't even using TLS encryption for client-server traffic, which is…

If they weren't using TLS, I'd guess that this wasn't cutting corners but rather intentional to help caching. Ten people watching the same video can get the same data packets, ten people watching the same video over TLS have ten data streams with nothing in common.
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