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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?

#131

Post by sippeangelo »

kossTKR wrote: post #22
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…

In addition to buffering the next 10 or so videos in your feed, they also only buffer the first few seconds of each of them (likely driven by an individual metric of how quickly users tend to swipe off them, or how confident the algorithm is that you’ll be interested).

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

#132

Post by poorbutdebtfree »

comte7092 wrote: post #130

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 wi…

Also the elephant in the room is that by design, Chinese companies aren't constrained by BlackRock's ESG rating. Western companies have to devote significant resources to "diversity, inclusion, and equity" while Chinese just hire by meritocracy. I bet they wake up and go to bed laughing at our ridiculousness.

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

#133

Post by comte7092 »

poorbutdebtfree wrote: post #132
comte7092 wrote: post #130

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 wi…

Also the elephant in the room is that by design, Chinese companies aren't constrained by BlackRock's ESG rating. Western companies have to devote significant resources to "diversity, inclusion, and equity" while Chinese just hire by meritocracy. I bet they wake up and go to bed laughing at our ridiculousness.

I’m not sure that major tech companies are all that heavily driven by esg ratings, but you’re definitely correct that there’s a difference in work culture.

Chinese tech is notorious for the 996 work schedule, that wouldn’t fly in the west.

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

#134

Post by ActorNightly »

pjc50 wrote: post #108
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…

> ByteDance might have financial backing and motivations that make it easier to throw more money at this problem than its American competitors. American VC can provide almost unlimited money. What it can't do is focus its spending on things that actually work. The original question frames this in terms of technical talent, but it's not that at all. There are all sorts of US firms and even HN posters who could, given…

I think the idea behind Tik Tok being good is that it was designed with tech goals in mind, unlike monetization in apps based out of US companies. My bet is that Bytedance is building generative models for video/audio for propaganda purposes (with the government involved of course), and Tik Tok is essentially their data set generator, so they designed the system for throughput from the ground up.

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

#135

Post by dan-robertson »

dimmke wrote: post #124
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

I think a large number of HN comments are low effort/totally wrong in a lot of areas (including some of mine). I haven’t noticed this being particularly the case for TikTok but I do notice it more for subjects I know more about.

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

#136

Post by hot_gril »

acdha wrote: post #114
toast0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be not uncommon for some ISPs and corporations/schools to run transparent caching HTTP proxies. I don't know how much of that still exists, but anything helps.

One of the benefits of HTTPS everywhere was breaking the bad versions of those systems: I remember Vodafone ES having one which cached resources far longer (months) than the Cache-Control headers allowed, and mobile ISPs used ByteMobile to over-compress images. You still see opt-in proxies, which are at least better in the sense of the user being able to see the config & trust relationship when something breaks.

Yeah, feels good not having the ISP mess with that anymore.

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

#137

Post by cruano »

reportgunner wrote: post #119
chevman wrote: post #32

What 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 :)

I also love how a creator can respond to a comment with another video and you are able to read the comment and click it in the new video to go back to the original comment and video they are responding to. Same with stiches and duets.

I think old YouTube had a similar feature, but killed it to become "the next cable tv"

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

#138

Post by hot_gril »

robjan wrote: post #70
hot_gril wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't be long before some cell plans have special discounts for TikTok data like with WhatsApp. Unless it's a thing already.

It's a thing, especially in developing countries. You often get xGB data with an additional xGB social media data.

Yeah, constant reminder not to take the wide-open internet for granted.

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

#139

Post by hot_gril »

muzani wrote: post #77
hot_gril wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's subtle differences here, but Google tends to use a lot more English words, and Huawei talks mostly in code. I learned how well code speaks when working with remote web/mobile app contractors who hardly spoke English and had a 12hr time difference. If they didn't understand something right the first time, it could cost a day of progress. I started giving them code or cURL examples on how to use every backend…

I was mostly answering that last question, "How did they manage to get the engineering talent when seemingly FB, MS, Netflix, Amazon, Google are all fighting for that talent?" which I think is a false assumption - they don't need as much engineering talent, they do more with less.

Oh yeah, they probably do. FAANG can throw really expensive engineers at simple problems and still get bad results, or they can accomplish great things.

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

#140

Post by gardenhedge »

gernb wrote: post #69
jrockway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 view…

The worst experience for me is trying to play videos in the google photos mobile app (or the website). It can take 1-2-3-4 minutes (or never) for it to finally play a video I uploaded from my phone a few days, weeks ago.

Yes! I've had the same experience but forgot to list it in my initial post.
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