TikTok and the Sorting Hat

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.)

Also, ugly people get a lot of attention. I would expect china's social credit system to discredit those who are less attractive, but on tiktok you see less than conventionally attractive creators get a big following. They don't even need to be freak shows, it's just an app that's full of regular people openly talking about regular things. Very much the opposite of what I have heard about the way media works in china.

Big part of the appeal of snapchat was that you could be silly and send goofy shit without leaving a permanent record of it on your feed...

2. From my experience on Chinese social media, the debate on policies and voices on public grievances are common place. When there is a huge public blacklash for something the government is done, it might be filtered to tone down the "heat", but I believe that is to reduce the chance of the incident develop into uncontrolled populism and social unrest. For these incidents, the government usually acts really fast to address the incident. An investigation could be launched, and any government official found with wrongdoing is promptly sacked.

I find for public grievances, the government is already addressing many of them. For others, the government usually acknowledge it after sometime and add it to its working plan. For example, a lot of people were criticizing air quality in early 2010s. By 2013, government's added air quality to its working agenda and released a series of comprehensive plans to address air quality. For the past 8 years, the work on air quality has been consistent. And you can see how much air quality has improved in China. Same thing with poverty, education issues, left behind child, health care etc. So I believe the government does listen to the public, even though public backlash might be filtered at the moment.

A group of people demand change, but changes need time, government and society need time to adjust. The group that demand change could think that its their right to demand change and world should listen. They might use tactics such as massive protests to demand the world's attention. But mass protests in China massively dense cities could cause financial and live lost to others. At that point the group that demand change inadvertently infringing on others right to peace and good health. This is fear. The fear is not about criticisms for the government, but its about hot blooded public demands that grow into populism and hate. And populism creates irrationality in the society that doesn't help to address the issue and might cause more damages. Criticisms are to be addressed in the framework set out by the political system and in an environment that allows rational debate and negotiations.

Filtering on Chinese internet is about controlling populism, any kind of populism. In fact, articles that stoke mindless love for the ccp, personal admiration for xijingping, or hot blooded nationalism are also filtered. Also the platforms will try to remove fake news, spam accounts soliciting money, child pornography, and other illegal content. This stuff seems to be practiced in western internet.

I don't know this is the right way to do things though.

I think the general point is right (culture can be abstracted), but I am skeptical that ML/AI alone would have been sufficient.

Music.ly blew up in 2015 and was in the top app charts for a year before Bytedance bought them. They were at 133 million registered users and 40 million MAU in 2016. What was the wall they hit?

https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/wp-content/uploads/si...

Five years is enough time to understand a lot more than someone who has never set for in the country. Naturally, there's other things that they still wouldn't understand after twenty years.

Other companies are failing because they're making mistakes that someone who's been in the US less than a year could recognize. ("Don't use imagery of white and black people facing off to advertise that your product comes in white and black colors.")

Am not myself a TikTok user, but my partner is, so I've seen a bunch of it second hand.

I think it is completely meaningful to call it next generation (or second generation where the social graph model is the first generation).

Also notice that this model can be applied to other media formats: Text, pictures, audio ...

In my opinion the longer length also allowed audio-based trends (which Vine did introduce a year or so before its demise) to really take off. For all that older people mock TikTok dances, there's something to be said for users actively participating in creative trends instead of simply passively consuming them (and there are much, much worse things a teen could be doing on/for the internet than practicing half a minute of choreography).

There is an account I follow that's run by a man who's trying to beat a soda addiction. He's posted a video announcing that he hasn't drunk any fizzy drinks every day for the past fifty-eight days, and he seems to have inspired a lot of people to grab a water instead of a soda at least once. I wish more of my social media experience was like that.

Granted, I'm American, and thus biased. I do see corruption in my government, but from what I can tell it's a small drop in the bucket compared to what goes on in China. Although I guess there could be debate on what defines corruption. But I still hear tales of basically needing to openly bribe officials to get contracts through manufacturing.

The main reason being ByteDance had deep pockets to acquire users. The amount of ad spend on user acquisition was unreal at $3m a day through 2018 and 2019. Literally billions were spent on promoting the app. Any half decent social media app would have done well.

When they get their massive exit, the hype will deflate and the users will grow out of TikTok and find another rockstar social network. Rinse and repeat.

The wests adoption of the personal computer introduced video editing there, and the companies who make the editing software have mostly kept it there.

Perhaps this is true for the very first content you see, but not true once the algo becomes personalized?

The Slate article you linked talks about Facebook doing a similar thing, and facing a similar backlash.

Is it really that hard to believe that a country of over a billion people, with a mature domestic tech industry and startup scene, would eventually produce something that would compete successfully in the west?

You don't need an algorithm to hide unattractive people. Ever seen a modern TV show or a casting contest or seen the latest comic adaption in cinema? People voting out the unattractive or even unconventionally attractive is an old story, the more mainstream the content the more the stars look like models. On Youtube it happens with Likes and on TikTok it happens through some ML magic, I guess in China there's no fucks given about actually baking it into the algorithm directly but that's hardly more than a technical detail

In the East, or the North, or the South, if you acquired another company for 1B you’re certainly not an upstart. (Unless you still consider Dropbox, Airbnb, etc. upstarts.)

I think that living beings do not know how to survive alone, so being alone is something bad biologically and arouses something in us that makes us feel bad ... call it "loneliness" or whatever you want, but that thing kills you if you stay alone

The Facebook Newsfeed UI, for example, has to balance so many different signals. Compare that with TikTok's UI, which is very efficient at collecting a clear reinforcement signal and only has to deal with one homogenous kind of data. It's like the entire TikTok team, not just the data scientists, focused in on doing ML really well.

I'm really impressed and kind of scared whenever I use TikTok. It really does feel like a whole different level of ML-powered addictiveness, designed from the ground up rather than having the ML part added on.

Say, if FB starts using its AI chops to build smart video analysis tools which can be used by law enforcement, you would probably have employee mutiny at your hands.

I was seeing a Vice video on the surveillance technologies the companies are building in China where the engineer building it was so excited to show the technology he had built not thinking about how invasively it tracks everything, keeps history etc. I would just call it a cultural gap.

America has gotten way too comfy with the idea that it's number 1 and forgotten that it's not an intrinsic role given to it, but something it had to work for. It's starting to look a little rough.

But they are competing with companies now which don't have the same ideological issues.

@kakkun My guess is that it would be limit direct sunlight, though if that were the case, a shade higher up might look better.

I do remember someone telling me that if you go into a Costco food court people often gravitate to the tables with an umbrella on them even though they are indoors. Their theory was that people do like to have something over their heads in such a big warehouse-size space.

Possibly (pure speculation here): if you carefully observe, at massive scale, how a system [1] behaves, it may provide some insights into how it is implemented. And based on those learnings, iteratively improve how the platform feeds tests and analyzes responses to gain deeper understanding of the system over time.

[1] In this case, "the system" consists of individual human minds, as well as the overall network of minds.

Let me put it another way then: Is the success of musical.ly and its successor TikTok really about somehow getting licensed music on a platform out the gate? And the sorting hat is just a good refinement that wouldn't have a chance to exist without the licensing?