Article: TikTok’s Secret Sauce
Happy holidays! Below are highlights from an excellent piece by Arvind Narayanan, which I highly recommend reading in full for greater critiques of competitors like YouTube & Instagram. Articles about TikTok, similarly to Bytedance, tend to focus on the abstract, and this piece grounds the discussion around tangible user interface design. TikTok’s UI advantage, not algorithmic, should be kept in the back of one’s mind when thinking about Meta’s $30 billion+ capex spend which is primarily for “AI”, and for any consumer facing tech companies, especially as more noise is made about e-commerce integration. (Quick aside: Amazon integrating short form video broadly validates TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram e-commerce integrations, and is another reminder of how things come full circle: Just as streaming players are generally reinventing cable, consumer apps are functionally aiming towards reinventing QVC.)
Lastly, as a thought experiment, if TikTok US is divested and if the FTC won’t rule in on this transaction, it would be fascinating to think about who would bid, from Walmart and Amazon to Meta and Alphabet, and what that implies about our opinions of where these companies are headed.
“…it’s a standard recommender system of the kind that every major social media platform uses. Besides, recommender systems are a topic of furious research in computer science, and it would be implausible for TikTok engineers to have made a breakthrough that no one else knows about. Companies stay at the cutting edge by having their researchers and engineers participate in the open culture of knowledge sharing at conferences such as RecSys. A company walling itself off will only get left behind. For all these reasons, I don’t believe TikTok’s algorithm is its secret sauce.”
“On YouTube, every time you select a video but then decide you don’t want to watch it, it’s an annoying process of scrolling to find another one. On TikTok, swiping up is so quick that you don’t consciously notice. So even if YouTube’s and TikTok’s algorithms are equally accurate, it will feel much more accurate on TikTok.”
“TikTok’s algorithm treats each video more or less independently to assess its viral potential, caring relatively little about how many followers the creator has. This would be a trivial algorithm change for its competitors. What’s stopping them? Only the fact that their top creators, who collectively determine the platform’s fate, would rebel, because they stand to lose the fruits of the following they’ve built up over years.”
“What TikTok lacks in superstars it more than makes up for in its “long tail” of creators. The app is far more successful in converting content consumers into creators, in part because its creator tools are superior and more fun.”
“TikTok is notable for placing a relatively high emphasis on exploration compared to other platforms. Every video seems to be guaranteed a certain minimum number of views. If the video performs well in that initial test, it will be served to successively larger batches of users.”
“Again, the secret sauce is not the algorithm, because it would be trivial for other platforms to increase the preference for exploration. It comes back to the scrolling experience: TikTok is able to take risks because all it takes is a swipe.”
“Despite TikTok’s design innovations being well known, other apps have trouble copying them because they were originally designed for a very different experience, and they are locked into it due to their users’ and creators’ preferences.”