What you see on TikTok reflects content that survives the crucibles of Chinese internet filtering. "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. Of course, politics and toxicity exist all over Chinese internet as well, they just get filtered / harmonized over time or never reach many eyes in the first place. It maybe a bad unitary model for governing cyberspace policy for an entire country, but it's has merits when applied to certain audiences / networks and the west should learn from it even if TikTok gets banned.

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...

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.

OT but this is the first time I see China's "social credit system" not being described as a myth on HN. People usually just repeat the myth pushed by mainstream media. Can you suggest something to read on this?

A 2019 compilation of experts: http://socialcredit.triviumchina.com/what-is-social-credit/k...

Otherwise the system is still very new and in progressive. If it's anything like BRI, it could be a massive uncoordinated internal shitshow of competing jurisdictions and incentives that doesn't pull together into anything cohesive for a long time.

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.

That's the magic of censorship, to make the masses feel good, coz ignarance is bliss, the news are harmonious and bad apples are handled by the dear gov.

They raised money to build education product with short videos in it.

The education product was not doing well. So they cut everything and kept the short video part.

Sounds familiar?

YouTube was initially a dating website with videos. Then they cut the dating part and kept videos.

Instagram was initially a checkin app with photos. Then they cut the checkin part and kept photos.

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.)

This is the opposite of the article's thesis. Musical.ly hit a wall. Only after it was purchased by Bytedance, rebranded as TikTok, and Bytedance poured their magical, cultural-agnostic AI sauce (and ad dollars) did TikTok truly take off. By all indications, this AI magic was wholly created in China and retrofitted onto TikTok.

The article's thesis is that AI doesn't need to understand the culture when it can understand the person at an individual level. The closing anecdote emphasizes the point: a Chinese startup that has a number 1 news app in India and not a single person in the company can read any of the content in their app (Hindi)?! How is that for not understanding a culture?

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...

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

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.")