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.
Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
31–40 of 152 posts
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#32What sold me on Tik Tok (I'm a early 40 year old guy!) was realizing how their algo allowed you to drill in to a musical emotional trip like no other platform that I've seen to date.
You find a video, with a song, that you vibe with. Now, click on the bottom right sound graphic and you can watch ALL the videos produced with that sound and vibe.
It is part of the core product!
So good it's hard to describe :)
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#33> Compare that to the Reddit video player This is worthy of it's own question. Why is Reddit's player so uniquely bad? It's worse than any other video player on the entire internet.
It’s serverless
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#34Is the tiktok tech REALLY that good?
i don't know if TikTok's tech is that good or not, but it seems apparent that silicon valley was unable to compete with it until we got even more-massive direct assistance from Uncle Sam and other government entities.
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#35tiktok has exactly one video format, and the videos are small and can compromise on quality because they’re intended to be viewed on mobile. processing becomes a lot easier when you only need to transcode to one format. and also it’s a linear feed, so they can preload the next videos ahead of time. just open up your browser console and you can see for yourself how big each video is and their preloading.
i definitely wouldn’t call this evidence that their tech is good though.
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#36I'm curious about this as well. Specially how their videos barely buffer and almost instant. you could say that they can preload them cause for you is mostly VOD, but they have live as well and it may not be as instant. its still feels pretty instant no matter how fast you scroll. I don't know how to inspect their app but their website version is using video/x-flv progressive download for playback. which surprised cause
1. I thought flash was deprecated by the browser and
2. I thought the industry has moved onto HLS/Dash or stream via websockets for live streaming.
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You might skip the TikTok ones or not reach them. Every time you close the app or change contexts, it probably wastes ~5 preloaded video intros. Reddit and Twitter could do the same. It's not necessary to load the entire video, just the first few seconds. But since video isn't the main focus of those, I can see them not feeling the need to optimize it so much.
I think Twitter's video servers are also just slow.
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#38I 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…
Even ignoring these things, they seem to do pretty well. I only use TikTok by being linked to it, and the video always works. The same cannot be said of Reddit, which often just shows a spinner, or sometimes it gets stuck midway through the video, or sometimes keeps playing sound even when you navigate to a different page.
I think Reddit is just especially terrible. They had to write custom code for handling the viewport autoplay, and ... I guess didn't implement everything else correctly.
YouTube has been fine for ages, though, and have great keyboard shortcuts that no PM would ever think to ask people to add. They just added them in 2008 and kept them all working through 5 versions of HTML. Not bad.
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#39People 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.
TLS is usually terminated at the CDN, isn't it? I actually don't remember. If so, it's not a problem for caching.
Re: Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
#40Disclaimer: 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.
Yes, they are. That's a link to the English language site, and it shows 310 openings under the R&D category.
Click the link for "Careers in China" in the footer and filter by R&D: 6526 job openings.
https://jobs.bytedance.com/experienced/position?category=670...