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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 152 posts

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

#51

Post by cellularmitosis »

nostromo wrote: post #25

> 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.

Indeed. The behavior I've seen consistently is that the first N seconds play, then buffering starts, and it _never recovers from buffering_. And it has been this way for at least a year. Astonishing.

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

#52

Post by acdha »

PeterisP wrote: post #30
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.

CDNs usually cache the plaintext object rather than the encrypted stream. What I’d believe is that they started with a CDN which charged more for HTTPS support - I believe they used Akamai at one point, which would make sense since they had some of the best presence in China in the 2000s and into the 2010s and DEFINITELY charged noticeably more for HTTPS unless you could negotiate well.

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

#54

Post by not_kurt_godel »

TechnicolorByte wrote: post #47
jawr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s serverless

For someone who doesn’t know much about this stuff, what does that mean?

Ignore them, it's unlikely they know what they're talking about at multiple levels

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

#55

Post by syrrim »

TechnicolorByte wrote: post #47
jawr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s serverless

For someone who doesn’t know much about this stuff, what does that mean?

Usually that it works via "functions" like aws lambda that don't maintain a long running process, but instead start a new process for every request.

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

#56

Post by fregante »

nostromo wrote: post #25

> 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.

The fun part is that they completely botched an experience that iOS can delivery natively. I built a mini app to extract the HSL stream from a URL and have iOS play it. It usually solves my problems with it: https://arte.vercel.app/

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

#57

Post by timmit »

No one mentioned the UX design of Tiktok?

From what I can recall, TikTok was the first one to let you to swipe to watch/switch videos, so users can easily be stuck on it, no matter the short video's quality is good or bad, interesting or boring. Since one single swipe, you changed to another, the cost is very low for user even the video quality is not good.

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

#58

Post by nhecker »

hot_gril wrote: post #39
PeterisP wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes.
Post reply on HN