History of TikTok

The video sharing/watching app TikTok is all in the news of late. First, India banned the app following Galwan. And then the US is forcing it to either sell off or get out of the US market. So what is the story of TikTok?

 

Eugene Wei wrote this excellent history of the app. In 2014, the app started off in Shanghai as an “educational short-form video app”! It was a big flop. It was rebranded as Musical.ly, an app to “lip-synch music videos”, and went to the US:

“Finally, an app offered users the chance to lip synch to the official version of popular songs and have those videos distributed to an audience for social feedback.”

But “there are only so many teenage girls in the U.S.”, and thus, after some time, growth flattened out. At which point they were bought by Bytedance, a Chinese tech company, for $1 billion. Who rebranded it as TikTok.

 

Bytedance did 2 things to make TikTok the phenomenon it is. First, they spent a lot of money to get users for the app. Second, and far more importantly, they improved the algorithm that decides what videos the app shows you, the “For You Page” feed algorithm. FYP for short.

 

Let’s take a digression on why TikTok was so popular, whereas existing giants couldn’t do much in the short-video space. Facebook and Twitter are social networks: they expect users to identify their friends, “one connection at a time”. This mechanism, however, isn’t a good indicator of what you like. Sure, you’re friends with someone but that doesn’t mean you like everything they like. Worse:

“Think of what happened to Facebook when it’s users went from having their classmates as friends to hundreds and often thousands of people as friends, including coworkers, parents, and that random person you met at the open bar.”

The outcome? “An annoyance everyone understands”.

 

TikTok, on the other hand, doesn’t identify what you like based on your friends or who you follow. It starts by showing you random videos, sees how long you watch them, and notes which ones you like (or don’t like):

“It is passive personalization, learning through consumption.”

In theory, YouTube could do that, but YouTube videos are long. So it would take very long to learn your preferences. TikTok videos, being ultra-short, give it the chance to collect maximum feedback within a short interval. Of course, the algorithm has to be awesome great to learn so much about you that fast.

 

That, in short, is why TikTok got so popular: it’s algorithm is great, it learns what you like very fast, it’s videos are very short, and it doesn’t try and infer (and thus get wrong) what you may like based on who your friends or contacts are:

“There’s a reason that many people in the U.S. today describe social media as work. And why many, like me, have come to find TikTok a much more fun app to spend time in.”

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