Summary
TikTok has managed to break into the US market and become the most popular source for meme origination and dissemination. This is due to its combination of a massive marketing spend and its powerful algorithm. The algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user. TikTok has figured out the hardest piece, the algorithm, and with the right product vision and execution, it can continue to be successful.
Top Highlights
- Now imagine that level of hyper efficient interest matching applied to other opportunities and markets. Personalized TV of the future? Check. Education? I already find a lot of education videos in my TikTok feed, on everything from cooking to magic to iPhone hacks
- In the two sided entertainment network that is TikTok, the algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight. The algorithm allows this to happen without an explicit follower graph.
- TikTok takes content from one group of people and match it to other people who would enjoy that content.
- For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called “marketplace of ideas,” the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the resulting culture wars. Until they have some real substantial ideas and incentives to take on the costly task of mediating between strangers who disagree with e...
- TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graph at scale because it doesn't really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is...
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Thoughts & Comments
Malcolm Mason Rodriguez
TikTok was able to use its algorithm to learn the taste and preferences of different cultures and subcultures that the developers had no experience with. This is how TikTok became big in America. It turns out that culture can be abstracted.
Kei
To help a network break out from its early adopter group, you need both to bring lots of new people/subcultures into the app—that’s where the massive marketing spend helps—but also ways to help these disparate groups to 1) find each other quickly and 2) branch off into their own spaces.
Kazuki Nakayashiki
Key Notes: - Entertainment network = an interest network. - Social graph !== interest graph (e.g. Twitter: you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow.) - ML algorithm can overcome cultural firewall.