This is a product-level dissection of what makes the app tick, not a technical discussion. The article discusses integration with other social networks, but doesn't discuss tech stack or research.
Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
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Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
They acquired Music.ly's users into their app, which I think kick-started their non-China userbase ...
The first paragraph of the article confirms: > Edit Notes: Chinese app company Bytedance acquired Musical.ly for nearly $1 billion in November 2017. Last week, it shut down Musical.ly and migrated all its users and content to Tik Tok, another short video app it owns. Musical.ly was incredibly popular in India with over 15 million users in the country. With the migration, Bytedance has created a large user base in the…
Yes noted. -- I commented first, then read the article, sorry!
Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#13dons tinfoil hat
Does anyone else find the jittery multicolored icon suspicious? It seems like it's begging to be used as a fingerprint to identify from which phone a video was recorded. It basically hides surveillance in plain site, and the fingerprint survives sharing/re-encoding.
Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#14This is a product-level dissection of what makes the app tick, not a technical discussion. The article discusses integration with other social networks, but doesn't discuss tech stack or research.
What research could be the research there, tho. It's a very simple principle.
Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#15I've been seeing this weird multicolored icon all around in imgur and reddit for some time now, but I never knew it was Bytedance (or even knew this company existed.) Never cared enough to do a reverse image search but it always amazed me that it was all over the place.
To give you an idea of how addicting this app can be for teens and tweens, kids in Hong Kong are risking their lives for likes:
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/community/article/214690...
Another article about how children don't understand the implications of putting their personal information in this app:
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education/article/214684...
Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#16So basically this is the new Vine?
Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#17dons tinfoil hat Does anyone else find the jittery multicolored icon suspicious? It seems like it's begging to be used as a fingerprint to identify from which phone a video was recorded. It basically hides surveillance in plain site, and the fingerprint survives sharing/re-encoding.
You can see this one at least; there's a load of fingerprinting algorithms out there that don't rely on something plainly visible.
Instead it's a very effective (IMO) watermark that draws the attention to the app and it was probably one of the reasons why it's so popular. I've seen it on Reddit a few times going 'wtf is that?'. Think of it like the modern-day's "Unregistered HyperCam 2".
Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#18This is a product-level dissection of what makes the app tick, not a technical discussion. The article discusses integration with other social networks, but doesn't discuss tech stack or research.
I'm actually a lot more interested in the product decisions than the tech stack. I wish there more product deep dives on HN.
Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#19So basically this is the new Vine?
I wouldn't call it "new".
Re: Anatomy of Tik Tok, the Viral Video App from China's Bytedance
#20Like eating potato chips, watching the videos on Douyin (Tik Tok) can become a non-stop action because it's a super convenient low-effort pleasurable thing to do, it's faster than fast food while lying on the sofa.
The app opens in sub-second and then starts playing a video right away, the video is also selected to conform to your previous likings. Or I also like to say it's the mobile phone era's bubble gums, a source of endless simple pleasure. Of course there are also many videos providing valuable educational content.
From my own experience, I feel Douyin has enforced pretty strict policies regarding what video are acceptable. A while ago I submitted a video about early day internet success stories such as eBay/PlentyOfFish/etc., it was rejected repeatedly. No reasons were given and I didn't bother to ask. I suspect it's because I had words "rich"/"money"/"quick success" in the description. You often hear other people's complaints in their videos, such as "My last one was deleted by Douyin and I don't know why." Anyway, it's just my one anecdote.