I get the impression that TikTok--due in no small part to its Chinese origin--also has an army of people explicitly moderating the community and re-weighting content, whether for reasons we might consider good or bad. I thereby really don't think it is fair to call it "AI/ML engagement algorithms unleashed", and I don't think it has any chance of falling into the content tarpits of YouTube (as extremist content would be removed or shadowbanned by humans) or Instagram (as low-effort content farms are essentially non-existent due to the moderation)... but, they also had a major scandal a couple years ago when we learned they were actively telling their moderators to filter out people who looked too ugly, poor, or disabled :/.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

> The makers of TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing app with hundreds of millions of users around the world, instructed moderators to suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor, or disabled for the platform, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. These same documents show moderators were also told to censor political speech in TikTok livestreams, punishing those who harmed “national honor” or broadcast streams about “state organs such as police” with bans from the platform.

This; and they have a legion of well educated MLEs in China working for much less in a cut throat competitive environment

This is wrong. When supply of world-class talent is low, the price of said talent goes up, not down. https://web.archive.org/web/20200831135137/https://www.bloom...

I have friends in China. At Douyin (China) there's a general resentment towards Tiktok (overseas, esp US), at the same level the folks at home are paid much less.

Also, the big TC numbers (for most ICs, not sure about high level execs) are mostly inflated illiquid RSUs.

yes...this is the trending HN narrative. but do you have any evidence to support this take? i read certain takes on HN soo often i start to feel i know them for fact, but do we really? Some of them are probably very wrong. Why couldnt tiktok just be doing the same things as meta, but a whole lot better?

The weird thing is, it wasn't long ago when HN was praising TikTok for feeling refreshing and quirky and reminding them of the creativity they missed on the "old web." How this place can sometimes turn on a dime...