Positioning TikTok as an application built for mobile devices from the beginning also gives it an advantage over rival platforms, which have to adapt their interface from desktop to mobile. Besides, entering the short video market early gives TikTok a big plus in the early stages. Instagram did not launch Reels before 2020, and YouTube introduced Shorts in 2021. Therefore, both are years behind TikTok in data and product development experience.
Explore content
TikTok also regularly recommends content that is outside of users’ interests, something the company’s leadership has repeatedly asserted is necessary for TikTok’s user experience.
A study, published last month by researchers from the US and Germany, shows TikTok’s algorithm “exploit user interests in 30% to 50% of recommended videos” after examining data from 347 TikTok users and 5 automated bots.
“This finding indicates that the TikTok algorithm chooses to recommend a large number of discovery videos to better infer user interests or maximize user retention by recommending more videos outside of the user’s interests.” their (known) preferences”, “TikTok and the Art of Personalization,” the researchers wrote in a study titled “TikTok and the Art of Personalization.”
Gather people into groups
Ari Lightman, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, points out another effective tactic that TikTok has used is to encourage users to form public groups through hashtags. Through this, TikTok can more effectively learn about users’ behavior, interests, affiliations and ideologies.
If TikTok is eventually banned in the US, according to Lightman, although American technology giants are certainly capable of copying TikTok with their own products, copying TikTok user culture is a difficult problem.
China’s advantage
TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is largely taken from Douyin, an app released in 2016. Although ByteDance often emphasizes that TikTok and Douyin are separate apps, a source from Reuters said the two algorithms remain similar to this day.
In turn, Douyin’s AI is strengthened by ByteDance taking advantage of cheap manpower in China. Parent company TikTok employs many people to carefully tag all the content and users on the platform.
Yikai Li, manager at advertising agency Nativex and former director of ByteDance, said: “Around 2018 and 2019, Douyin made an effort to tag every user. They would tag every video manually, then they tagged users based on the videos they watched.” This tactic also applies to TikTok.
While hiring data taggers is common and important for AI companies today, ByteDance was an early adopter of this strategy. According to Li, card sorting requires a lot of effort, so Chinese companies have an advantage thanks to abundant human resources and low costs compared to North America.
(Theo Reuters)
