TikTok and the Sorting Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#221

Post by beaunative » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

glaive123 wrote: post #207

mgraczyk wrote: post #121

> How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps Part of the explanation is that they weren't in Shanghai. The founders both worked full time at US tech companies in California when musical.ly was founded. musical.ly may have been founded while they were temporarily in Shanghai, but the founders were not some random people who didn't understand US culture. This is import…

This is misleading. The founders grew up and went to University in China. Working in California for 5 years likely isn't enough for someone to deeply understand US culture. Same goes for anyone living and working in a foreign country for 5 years. There's some things you can never understand.

This is a false dichotomy. I don't understand half of the things my parents do but that doesn't mean I don't understand my culture. Culture is defined by people living in it, not an isolated piece.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#222

Post by beaunative » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

ontifica wrote: post #179

dirtyid wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO TikTok's draw is that it's the anthithesis to American / western social media culture. It's algorithmic bias towards mainstream, playful, feel good content is a byproduct of Chinese style censorship. What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content fil…

This doesn't make any sense, I use tiktok and there's plenty of content I wouldn't expect china or america to endorse. There are lots of videos dedicated to communism, capitalism, uyghur muslims, BLM, etc. It's actually fairly open and this type of content gets noticeably boosted by the algorithm if you express interest in it, and gets a ton of likes too. There is also plenty of happy cat videos as well if that's you…

why would politicians censor content based on attractiveness? that doesn't make any sense. tbh most politicians aren't pretty anyway.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#223

Post by beaunative » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #17

codekansas wrote: post #3

Some really good points. Does anyone have a good explanation for why Chinese startups seem to have mastered build AI-centric apps while American startups (and large companies) lag behind? Edit: Want to rephrase this to avoid promoting nationalism. Why has ByteDance been so successful? TikTok / Douyin and Toutiao are both really big hits, Facebook hasn't had a comparable ground-up hit despite having top-notch ML engin…

Big US companies who have troves of user data usually have pretty strict policies about not just sticking it all through arbitrary ML pipelines for user privacy reasons. Small US companies don't have access to enough data. Companies in China have both lots of user data (1B+ internet users), and no privacy concerns about running ML experiments on that data (and observing user behaviour till they find success). Hence,…

This is not even remotely true, I once worked at a team in a company which aggresively run user segregation and send marketing emails based on it, then they collect click data to curate more effective emails

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#224

Post by beaunative » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #88

ry_co wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut instinct is that Netflix can't use the personalized algorithmic approach that TikTok succeeds with because Netflix has to pay dearly for its content, where TikTok does not. Because of the cost structure of licensing, Netflix cannot afford to have the diversity of content that TikTok's user-generated approach enables. A small content library makes it impossible to build a meaningfully personalized feed.

It's also much harder to tell why somebody liked a 2h movie, vs a 15 second clip. The 15 second clip only has so many properties, where as there's millions of reasons I might like one movie but not a similar one. Also, as far as Netflix, id rather see more diversity, and not see the same movie made over and over again. I would wager TikTok viewers are more willing to watch repetitive things play out.

This is not as difficult to understand as it might sound, Netflix can only run recommendation based on the series its audience has watched, and you can only watch so many series in a week. Whereas for 15 seconds clips, the engine get feed hundred if not thousands times more data it would on netflix data. so

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#225

Post by beaunative » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #160

Firebrand wrote: post #34

>At the time Musical.ly got renamed TikTok, it was still dominated by teen girls doing lip synch videos. Many U.S. teens at the time described TikTok as “cringey,” usually a kiss of death for networks looking to expand among youths, fickle as they are about what’s cool. Scrolling the app at the time felt like eavesdropping on the theater kids clique from high school. Entertaining, but hardly a mainstream entertainmen…

From the outside looking in a lot of their success came from sexualizing (underage) teenage girls. Don't know if that would've flown as well if the app had come out of Facebook or a different American tech giant.

Don't forget, sex is the driving force in so many human actions. I'd hardly blame it on platforms.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#226

Post by beaunative » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 3:26 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #47

chvid wrote: post #7

TikTok really is next-generation social media. Interesting that this should come out of China and not the west. Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.

>> the effect of monopolies stifling innovation. Less monopolies, more so western culture. Many of TikTok's algorithms would be subject to great scrutiny if run by a western company. YouTube would face riots if it were caught openly supressing or hiding videos of disabled, unattractive, or simply poor people. But such "innovation" is fine for a Chinese company. https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-use…

Youtube is likely doing the same thing. It just have the political sensitivity to not state it out loud. And honestly, come on, every entertainment platform does that, range from roadside stripper house to movies, whether it is desirable or not.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#227

Post by njj » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #142

wenbin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The musicaly people were already veterans in Silicon Valley tech scene (not young under silicon valley standard & with years of working experience). They raised money to build education product with short videos in it. The education product was not doing well. So they cut everything and kept the short video part. Sounds familiar? YouTube was initially a dating website with videos. Then they cut the dating part and ke…

Flickr: initially an image management/sharing tool for a 2d online game. Cut the game, kept the image sharing. Slack: initially an internal communication tool for another incarnation of the same game. Cut the game, kept the chat. (An incarnation of this game did briefly exist between these two, but only lasted about a year.)

https://www.sitepoint.com/slack-story-son-glitch/

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#228

Post by newen » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #206

titanomachy wrote: post #172

I installed TikTok out of curiosity after reading this article. I scrolled without stopping for a couple hours and then uninstalled the app. An endless stream of algorithmically curated 30-second videos is pure crack to my brain, apparently. I bet a lot of younger folks with still-developing brains are also unable to resist.

There's a classical conditioning loop where you see an attractive woman dancing to a song, which makes you subconsciously start to like the song, then you like videos with that song... it's the combined power of earworms and arousal. If they somehow make it taste like cheesecake we will have achieved full wireheading.

Smell-o-vision. The next revolution in smartphone technology!

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#229

Post by auganov » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

> But in the reverse direction, America has been almost as impenetrable to Chinese companies because of what might be though of as America’s cultural firewall

Why would they even try? You've got a nice big domestic tech ecosystem which would not have existed without protectionism. Most of these products aren't competitive at all. Nothing to do with culture, same reason Canada, UK etc aren't known for big tech successes.

Musical.ly is unusual in that they did actually work on an original idea and decided to launch the product in America where it took off first. Ended up not playing the China game early on.

> With it, a massive team made up mostly by people who’ve never left China, and many who never will, grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets they’d never experienced firsthand. To a cultural determinist like myself, that feels like black magic.

Pretty much every big American tech company does that. Nothing notable about this.

> I don’t think the Chinese product teams I’ve met in recent years in China are much further ahead than the ones I met in 2011 when it comes to understanding foreign cultures like America. But what the Bytedance algorithm did was it abstracted that problem away.

Understanding in what way? You work on a product and you optimize it for your users. If you work in a 100% domestically focused ecosystem obviously you'll design your products a little differently. What happened here is a Chinese company was for a change actually working on a product with a global userbase and they had to make them happy.

The whole thing is borderline insulting to the founders.

Re: TikTok and the Sorting Hat

#230

Post by Yhippa » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

titanomachy wrote: post #172

I installed TikTok out of curiosity after reading this article. I scrolled without stopping for a couple hours and then uninstalled the app. An endless stream of algorithmically curated 30-second videos is pure crack to my brain, apparently. I bet a lot of younger folks with still-developing brains are also unable to resist.

I'm an adult and normally don't get got by these types of apps but I found myself doing the same. I had to uninstall.