The unlikely odds of making it big on TikTok
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
Hank Green has a great video[0] on the difference since he is on both platforms, and unless there is more compensation to the creators, they will get burned out chasing the high of the occasional viral video.
People always say X network is going to go the way of MySpace, but when’s the last time that happened? I wouldn’t say any of FB, Twitter, Snap, Instagram have died off the way MySpace did. Certain age groups may have migrated to other platforms, but these networks are so ingrained and established that millions of people can leave and it doesn’t matter.
There’s still a huge population using all of the networks and unless a new app provides some new unique feature like Snapchat and TikTok did when people first started using them, I don’t see anything popping up to replace them.
Otherwise I can't see how they could auto-decide to push out content to large audiences without something they don't like getting out.
Like, they'd only need to sift through a handful of videos to reward random publishers with thousands of views, perhaps even with fake numbers, and people would probably gobble it up.
The recommendations and people's video interactions allow you to classify both people and videos.
First time I hear of TikTok in those terms. Could you expand on what that means?
The whole point of TikTok is that you don’t have to follow people or engage with your friends on the platform. You just open it up and it’ll show you videos that you’ll like. Obviously, there is a little bit of “training” involved. Within about 20-40 minutes it really started to zero in on things I liked.
Take Youtube, a video site that added suggestions. If you're logged in, you get dumped on a homepage with an endlessly scrolling list of recommendations. You scroll until a thumbnail or video title catches your eye, you watch that video, might like or comment, then click one of ~10 recommendations. The algorithm gets a positive signal based on what you click and your watch-time, but the negative signal on anything you don't click is incredibly weak. Because you choose what you watch, positive signals are mostly driven by titles, thumbnails and familiarity, and negative signals are rare. As a result, most recommendations are stuff you know or things adjacent to it (people who watch this also watch this), and quickly get boring. The recommendations can't inject novelty or purposefully expand the algorithm's knowledge.
Now on Tiktok: You open the app, you get a single video in full screen. Either you scroll on (negative signal) or you watch it until the end (positive), or you let it repeat (very positive). Or you might like or comment. After scrolling on, you get another video in full screen, same game again. The cost of a bad recommendation is low because videos are short and quick to judge, so the algorithm can occasionally give you videos it's uncertain about or that are selected completely randomly. Your reaction will give a signal, no matter what (either you watch till the end or you don't) and as a result the algorithm knows more about you and about the video.
My guess is every single video is marked by a human for how much exposure it should get, and if they let something get out that shouldn't, that person is reprimanded.
… Wait what? Why would that be your guess? How is this easier than, you know, anything else?
Maybe I’m too old for TikTok.
Sounds like this would heavily incentivize items that are immediately catchy. Slow buildup stuff would die in this environment.
To put it another way, TikTok is Ice Creme, Youtube is dinner. A popular Ice cream stand has a lot more throughput than most restaurants. It only takes ~1 minute to serve a customer some ice cream.
YouTube used to be full with 3-4 minute videos back in the day, with a ten minute maximum. Longer than TikTok, but not much. But those short videos all but died out when the 10-minute videos got another ad spot and thus more money for the creator.
Vary rarely do I see a < 10 second clip, most are 30 seconds - 1 minute.
If you are really interested, check the yc article in 2016. The algorithm is their bread and butter. They have been doing it for 10 years. What's more amazing to me is that not many ppl are aware of this.
Don't have any illusions, they can easily control what goes viral if it matters to the mothership.
I don't think they are successful at keeping off political content though, in the sense that denying political content is a political statement itself in favor of the status quo.
The manual shadowbanning fight is one they will never win.
If someone post a clip playing guitar and singing for example, would it determine this is a performance, and it should show it to cohorts who have liked viewing performances in the past?
Or would the AI model work more like… show (unknown type) clip to random people, identify similarities in the people who like or dislike the video based on those user’s viewing habits and then try to identify the video type based on that knowledge? I guess the second method would be very inefficient unless combined with some feature extraction and metadata / tagging from the source.
Not an ML person, just a curious dev.
Using it to establish yourself is great, it's a means to an end, a marketing tool like the rest.
Compare that to something like Twitter or Twitch. You can go for months, even years, without ever getting noticed.
I wonder if the inability to go viral relates to the difficultly of finding tiktok videos off-platform. Admittedly, every TT video I have ever seen has been sent to me via a share link.
Also, if your friends disown you because you choose not to use social media, are they really your friends? If they don't respect your decision, are unwilling to speak with you except through social media, then I personally wouldn't consider them friends. But that's up to you. And you can always make new friends.
Often a viral hit will be due to a beat or quirky lyrics that aren't repeated in the rest of an artists music. Continued success needs a fanbase that's interested in a lot more of your music.
It's not about the one trick pony hit's that exist on a single platform which the article is focused on, it is indeed the continuation afterwards which a creator's following will still exist beyond TikTok or wherever their debut hit originated from.
Inevitably, The corporations, media and the existing larger influencers from other platforms will join in and ruin the platform, just like they did with the rest of the others. The over glorified algorithm has already been gamed by them to increase engagement, ads, etc such that smaller and late creators have depleting chances of being recognised.
Nothing has changed.
https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/officialpsy
> 120.75M (+5.8%) Video Views for the last 30 days
And that's just on YouTube. Sure, none of their followups received quite the same amount of attention, but they certainly have a healthy sustained audience.
I guess it's a good idea to use a viral moment to gather those few fans who'll appreciate the art you'll like to make continuously.
Rebecca Black had a viral video that people liked because of how bad the song was, and how badly it was performed. She not only didn't disappear, but parlayed being known for something terrible into a entire career.
PSY was successful before and after Gangnam Style... But he's a Korean artist and never meant to go global so of course his appeal might be limited beyond one funny video.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_Nas_X#2018%E2%80%932019:_B...
> Lil Nas X began creating memes to promote "Old Town Road" before it was picked up by short-form video social media TikTok users. [...] Lil Nas X estimated he made about 100 memes to promote it; the song went viral in early 2019 due to the #Yeehaw Challenge meme on TikTok. Millions of users posted videos of themselves dressed as a wrangler or cowgirl, with most #yeehaw videos using the song for their soundtrack; as of July 2019, they have been seen more than 67 million times. Another core audience tied to social media is children who are hidden in the statistics of adult listeners. Quartz.com says the song certainly owes part of its success to the demographic, and notes they are attracted to the song being repetitive, easy to sing along to, and using lyrics about riding horses and tractors, which children can relate to. It debuted at number 83 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, later climbing to number one. The track also debuted on the Hot Country Songs chart at number 19 and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs at number 36. After an "intense bidding war", Lil Nas X signed with Columbia Records in March 2019.
Or is there room for people to game the system? I.e. publish content, and pay click farms to make your stuff look legit?
Yes they are.
It's the same old situation with YouTube's algorithm, where it dictates what gets seen or unseen on people's feeds and which tags get blacklisted or not and that is all done by TikTok. Once you change it, it can be controlled by a single entity for any reason. Since they have done this previously, angering a large section of its user base, they have the power to do it again.
> Or is there room for people to game the system? I.e. publish content, and pay click farms to make your stuff look legit?
It already has been gamed, both by amateurs and professionally.
In the professional case, it's already happened with the large advertisers, existing influencers and companies that have started to jump onto the platform. They have done it through promotional and backroom corporate deals, since they have enough money, influence to make sure that their content is pushed to the largest amount of users regardless. Hence this, all these systems have been gamed by this old tactic, and that includes this over glorified recommendation algorithm.
This is how it will get ruined, and it is beyond the hype comments and boosters that you see here screaming about the number of views they have, reminding us of the basic near peak of the power law where the majority of the hype will deplete once the large companies, existing influencers, advertisers start aggressively pushing their posts, ads, etc for engagement farming and growth in another social network, that will appear regardless of TikTok's algorithm.
Rinse and repeat.
Part of going viral is luck too. If you’re lucky some high profile account will share your post, and the popularity soars.
When you scroll past the "8 signs of successful musician" guide to the list of musicians, it pins the guide to the top of the screen so you can compare every musician. Really natural, should be everywhere.
You either follow trends or make your own. Otherwise you’ll fall off quickly.
Did anyone actually analyze what is happening there, i.e. how fair the system is or how much it is like a lottery?
He has another project that found that 21 of seven thousand bands became big, and those 7k were bands that had actually managed to book and play a small show. https://pudding.cool/2017/01/making-it-big/
Many people think that TikTok's algorithm is showing them what they want to see, but in truth it's showing people what makes the platform the most money inserted into brief videos made by people who aren't getting paid for their work, who are also hand picked by platform moderators.
TikTok will collapse as quick as it is rising when, just like Facebook, users stop logging in and stop posting content.
Platforms don't create sub-category lists for content because that causes them do do more work, and it also causes them generally to not be able to advertise things across the entire platform and test ads on markets more effectively. The truth of these giant platforms is that they don't help undiscovered creators, they exist to capture money from the largest business entities, and they woo big business in with huge user bases that often involve huge volumes of non-engaged and bot followers.
These sites also limit users visibility regularly in favor of showing platform ads and content from more popular *sponsored accounts. They also run verification for popular accounts to create even more content bias that hurts unknown creators that can't qualify for verification, just to show they are an authentic creator.
It's easy to tell how a platform's vibrance declines when a user has tens of thousands of followers, but only a hand full of likes on each post. This is most apparent right now on Twitter (for example). Platforms often generate fake user accounts to mimic vibrance as well, this also creates buzz as people don't take the time out to investigate actual engagement on sites before they report on them being popular.
TikTok removed post dates from being displayed on content they play so that you can't tell as a viewer that new content posts are in decline as users discover that the hype isn't working for them and that ads and sponsored posts are increasing. The majority of these large content platforms are all beginning to converge into charging users for visibility by promoting ad buying, another sign that they are really in decline rather than growing. When ads are purchased, many of these sites steer the ad content to overseas audiences that have no interest in buying products and services advertised as they slowly lose the ability to accurately target individual users.
The platforms that become most popular now are well versed in creating false narratives on potential for creator success and in creating smoke and mirrors and untruthful motivation content to keep encouraging independent creators to prop them up, but behind the scenes, they're all devoid of integrity and authentic user experiences, while being full of hope and promises that they don't deliver based on being their business models alone.
I recommend saving time and having a far better online presence as a creator, business, or brand by building and cultivating your own web site. Social media is dysfunctional, very costly for minor success, and time consuming while only offering short-term durability and name recognition.