The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

1.) Does the machine learning algorithm behind toutiao abide by the censorship effort from Beijing? For example, are any of the contents about the disappearance of the wife of the nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobao censored?

2.) What happens when the Chinese government demand board seats, much like Tencent and Alibaba? Or is toutiao already working with the Chinese government closely?

3.) Do you know whether or not toutiao is allowing this technology to be outsourced to other dictatorship countries that would allow their leaders to effectively control the contents people read every day?

4.) Are you aware that toutiao is spreading its influence into East Asia, and possibly India, and is it possible that it would spread Chinese government's message through its apps?

> The engine learns quickly – for most users, it takes less than one day to successfully learn their interests (indicated by 80% read rates).

That is insane. I don't know of any other platform (except for maybe image heavy subreddits?) that have that rate of content consumption. Facebook obviously tries, but they are so focused on their limited content sources that they frequently don't have the content people want. Twitter has similar issues, if there aren't 50 tweets you want to read in a row, as you keep scrolling Twitter has to drop the quality of content down to make sure the feed shows something.

But by being willing to surface any type of content (give users what they want), it sounds like Toutiao has been able to fully leverage AI, removing constraints on what content exists naturally leads to better results.

Also, it is a miracle if they truly solved ad targeting. In comparison, I am still getting ads for a belt I bought 3 weeks ago.

I have an account on Youtube that I used for only a specific interest.

Youtube's suggestions are pretty bad. And they've declined in quality. And Youtube makes a strong effort to selling me mainstream content that I uniformly reject. And I can find better recommendations on suggested videos fitting my interest than I find on the Youtube landing for my account. And I'd be for Youtube to keep a list of search terms and such for further viewing.

My deduction from this is that Youtube is more interested in pushing content of other people's choice than giving me what I want. And that's pretty standard for how all media has worked since the early days of radio.

So it seems like it would be easy for a content company to get engagement by giving people what they want to view. And the challenge problem is often what people want to view doesn't garner much payment per views. And so having a bunch of engagement by itself doesn't give you success, rather what makes money is careful balance of desired content and pushed-content (IE crap).

Toutiao stays true to Asian usability dogmas and opens all links in new tabs (target="_blank")[1].

[1]: http://www.toutiao.com/

It's a problem orthogonal to what Google solved earlier in the millenium, which is roughly "How do I find an answer on the Internet to a question I already have in mind?"

As the Internet has developed, the cost of content creation and data have decreased dramatically. And so the sheer quantity of content has exploded. Every consumer tech company has partially recognized this problem - Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Instagram, Snapchat, and Medium all want to recommend you relevant content, all have adopted feeds of articles and posts and pictures, and all desperately want your continued attention.

At this point, there's likely good content on the Internet for every single person's taste (like Anu said, there's a very long tail of content creators). The service that provides the most relevant selection of it will win consumer interest and usage at the largest scale.

And it certainly seems that Toutiao has leapfrogged everyone else in this regard. I'm very excited (but also a little wary) to see what they come up with in the future.

Your insightful analysis of Toutiao's AI depth is enough to tempt one to dip a toe should shares trade publicly. But the revenue growth (contextual ad based) is phenomenal as well. Any clues as to how they might seek to expand into paid content or media? Or otherwise grow beyond Chinese language centric markets?

Chinese startup Toutiao raising funds at over $20 billion valuation

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-toutiao-fundraising...

so many wasted lives

Most probably this might not get a reply but I still wanted to know about this statement - "During the 2016 Olympics, a Toutiao bot wrote original news coverage, publishing stories on major events more quickly than traditional media outlets. The bot-written articles enjoyed read rates (# of reads and # of impressions) in line with those produced at a slower speed and higher cost by human writers on average."

1. What does writing original news coverage entail? Did the bot put together couple of news source to create an article or do you mean it transcribed the news from the live video feed as it happened?

2. How much of the bot feed works due to high declension? [1]. Because normally bot structure and output tend to make less sense as the sentence structure comes out all wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

Additionally, there is quite a lot of focus on getting user to stay on the platform. Not to sound alarmist here but doesn't it mean you are most of the time helping people reinforce their world views? News should be reported as is but then if user engagement is so important news will be written right or left wing just to keep the user on platform.

Anyone else deeply uncomfortable with this? Not a useful app, an addictive app. :/

http://www.toutiao.com/a6474835351272686094/#p=7

The (Beijing?) smog pictured here is somehow more poignant since the article has 0 to do with pollution... just people living their lives. Scary.

You can copy/paste each string into google translate individually, if you're patient enough ;)

Why does Toutiao use this metric to measure quality of an article?

Toutiao is a privately owned company held in Beijing. Am I being paranoid? They can claim machine learning (and they probably do). However, until we can be 100% certain the Chinese government is not involved, I wouldn't personally trust any of the stats.