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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?

#121

Post by HPsquared »

sirpunch wrote: post #80
dan-robertson wrote: post #26

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 part…

> "TikTok can employ them in a less competitive labour market and not fight companies like Google which don’t operate in China." Is this really true though? I imagine the market for SDEs in china is much more competitive and cut throat. There are only so many locals/immigrants to choose from in the US, hence the higher salaries. A lot of top talent in Silicon Valley have almost worked at all FAANG companies.

Competition between employers, I think.

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

#123

Post by dimmke »

preciousoo wrote: post #112
dimmke wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I could be pretty wrong there. The history of TikTok is actually murkier than that. I listened to a podcast about this, I wish I could find it again. The narrative that seems to be popular is that ByteDance launched this app called Douyin in China and it was so successful they decided to launch it globally, and thus TikTok was born and hit the ground running. But the podcast I listened to told the story from the…

I thought this was common knowledge but I guess not. But then again I lived with my preteen siblings when the whole musically/TikTok merger happened so for them it was huge news

It's definitely not common knowledge- especially for people who don't use TikTok and only became aware of it in the last 2-3 years.

And I actually think it benefits the Chinese government for this revisionist history of the app to be the story that "wins" - because it portrays China as this mysterious force with previously unknown insight, power, and plans. When in reality the bones of TikTok came directly out of the same place as most new social apps do.

If you look at the Wikipedia article for Musical.ly - it goes through great effort to talk about how it was a Chinese company that happened to have a "Santa Monica office" but if you look at the Crunchbase profile for Musical.ly - the story is different. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/musical-ly/company_f...

The companies that participated in those funding rounds are not blue chip VCs and do have foreign ties - but they are specifically focused on investing in US startups.

I would love to see a journalist at The Verge or somewhere that writes about tech in the same way tackle this topic. I think it's a missing piece in a lot of the discourse around TikTok.

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

#124

Post by dimmke »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #89
motoxpro wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the Chinese market is MUCH more competitive than the US market. Do a few searches for the salaries of AI/engineers. Just because Chinese companies don't operate in the US doesn't mean they are small.

Half their country isn't up to US middle class standards yet, they still have plenty of cheap labor to acquire.

TikTok has offices all over the world and competes for SDEs in the traditional places like Seattle and San Francisco: https://careers.tiktok.com/position?keywords=&category=67098...

Any FAANG engineer or someone who looks at job postings in those areas would know this. The comments I see about TikTok on Hacker News in general are so much more low effort, low knowledge/low research than other areas it is genuinely concerning to me. There's so many blanket assumptions that go unresearched, unchallenged. It's bizarre.

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

#125

Post by EnergyAmy »

weird_user wrote: post #97
motoxpro wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't order by date or filter on Google either. I think the fact that young people use it over google as a search says something.

Actually, google's paid search API can order by date, ascending or descending. Checkout this example: https://quackquackgo.net/?q=hacker+news&lr=&qqg-date=&qqg-ra...

I don't understand how the dates work on that. On the search you linked, the first result is an HN post with a date listed as "2000-09-18", but if you click the link, the post was from 3 months ago.

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

#126

Post by weird_user »

EnergyAmy wrote: post #125
weird_user wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, google's paid search API can order by date, ascending or descending. Checkout this example: https://quackquackgo.net/?q=hacker+news&lr=&qqg-date=&qqg-ra...

I don't understand how the dates work on that. On the search you linked, the first result is an HN post with a date listed as "2000-09-18", but if you click the link, the post was from 3 months ago.

This is probably because the HN page doesn't contain the document date metadata. So google just picked a random date from that page.

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

#127

Post by readonthegoapp »

ulfw wrote: post #100
readonthegoapp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then how come instagram's Reels (a copycat product) works as fast, as efficient and with the same kind of UX? Are you saying instagram got "massive direct assistance from Uncle Sam and other government entities"? How would you even come up with that opinion?

did uncle same shut down reels too? i didn't see that.

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

#128

Post by voidpointercast »

Kukumber wrote: post #117
fsociety wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is misleading because you cite an article for proof of Facebook and Google being funded by three letter agencies.. but the article is strictly about Google.

[flagged]

Are the CIA agents in the room with us?

If so send me an offer, frankly it'd be an improvement.

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

#129

Post by revolvingocelot »

encoderer wrote: post #82
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.

Is Reddit what engineering at scale looks like when not funded by a surveillance monopoly?

Don't fret, surveillance is still baked right in. The video player is bad so that one installs the app, whose video player, and ability to spy on the user, is much superior to that of the browser.

The various ol., old., and i. subdomains, which still allow access to a functional reddit with a functional video player, are there to keep the old-school power users from revolting, for now, anyway.

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

#130

Post by comte7092 »

I’m just going to answer this last part:

> How did they manage to get the engineering talent when seemingly FB, MS, Netflix, Amazon, Google are all fighting for that talent?

China is both a huge labor market along with the largest mobile phone market in the world. Add to that fact that the great firewall has created a parallel internet, it’s been fairly inevitable that China will end up with some tech giants. Even with all the money that American tech giants have, they are at a disadvantage when it comes to tapping the massive labor market and consumer market within China.

Note that the same thing is happening with EVs. In ten years, the auto market will have several dominant Chinese automakers a la what happened with Germany and Japan in the 70s and 80s.

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