from article, "How TikTok Is Rewriting the World"
video editing tools
It’s a social network with an impressive suite of video-editing tools, Snapchatlike AR filters, and features that let you sync your video to nearly any soundtrack you can think of.
Video creators have all sorts of tools at their disposal: filters as on Snapchat (and later, everyone else); the ability to search for sounds to score your video. Users are also strongly encouraged to engage with other users, through “response” videos or by means of “duets” — users can duplicate videos and add themselves alongside.
Hashtags play a surprisingly large role on TikTok. In more innocent times, Twitter hoped its users might congregate around hashtags in a never-ending series of productive pop-up mini-discourses. On TikTok, hashtags actually exist as a real, functional organizing principle: not for news, or even really anything trending anywhere else than TikTok, but for various “challenges,” or jokes, or repeating formats, or other discernible blobs of activity.
TikTok is, however, a free-for-all. It’s easy to make a video on TikTok, not just because of the tools it gives users, but because of extensive reasons and prompts it provides for you.
You can select from an enormous range of sounds, from popular song clips to short moments from TV shows, YouTube videos or other TikToks. You can join a dare-like challenge, or participate in a dance meme, or make a joke. Or you can make fun of all of these things.
AI recommendations
"It is constantly learning from you and, over time, builds a presumably complex but opaque model of what you tend to watch, and shows you more of that, or things like that, or things related to that, or, honestly, who knows, but it seems to work. TikTok starts making assumptions the second you’ve opened the app, before you’ve really given it anything to work with. Imagine an Instagram centered entirely around its “Explore” tab, or a Twitter built around, I guess, trending topics or viral tweets, with “following” bolted onto the side.
Imagine a version of Facebook that was able to fill your feed before you’d friended a single person. That’s TikTok.
“ByteDance’s content platforms enable people to enjoy content powered by AI technology,” its website says. Its vision is “to build global creation and interaction platforms.” ByteDance’s wildly popular news and entertainment portal, Jinri Toutiao (translated as “Today’s Headlines,”) relies heavily on AI — not human editors, or a self-selected feed of accounts — to curate and create customized streams of largely user-and-partner-generated content tailored to each of its readers.
getting started:
"On most social networks the first step to showing your content to a lot of people is grinding to build an audience, or having lots of friends, or being incredibly beautiful or wealthy or idle and willing to display that, or getting lucky or striking viral gold. TikTok instead encourages users to jump from audience to audience, trend to trend, creating something like simulated temporary friend groups, who get together to do friend-group things: t
engagement
TikTok though is the towering stick falling far and fast, not caring to wait to evolve through a wriggling, cumbersome social phase, but instead asking: Why not just start showing people things and see what they do about it? Why not just ask people to start making things and see what happens? If engagement is how success is measured, why not just design the app where taking up time is the entire point?
“How do you get people to engage?” Apparently you just … show them things, and let a powerful artificial intelligence take notes. You start sending daily notifications immediately. You tell them what to do. You fake it till you make it, algorithmically speaking.
niche communities
To succeed, a platform also needs to welcome niche communities. TikTok is home to groups of contortionists, furries, cosplayers, fitness gurus, new parents, nurses, cops, Marines, adult babies, goth kids, and more. Some of the most popular TikTok cringe compilations and Twitter threads mock these people, but users in these communities say it’s the internet bullies who don’t get it.
Lesson 1: Help creators grow
Douyin treats its top influencers almost as its own employees. It actively helps promote them by subsidizing their traffic. In November 2017, ByteDance held a conference celebrating its content creators and announced it will spend $300 million to help them increase followers and generate revenue. Its stated goal is to help create 1,000 influencers with over a million followers in the coming year.
Douyin understood that its early adopters could determine the entire trajectory of the product. In its early days, Douyin’s team reached out
Lesson 2: Unleash the creativity of ordinary people
Many viral videos on Douyin are not created by celebrities, but ordinary people who did something really creative or impressive.
Lesson 3: Topic marketing – give people something to make videos about
Douyin regularly launches hashtags that serve as trending topics or themes on the platform. Hundreds of thousands of people participate in making videos on the same theme.
Lesson 4: Make content creation frictionless
Douyin’s product provides a toolkit that enables anyone with a smartphone and a good idea to create a 15-second video that could potentially go viral. This toolkit includes a large library of background music, a variety of filters (see “beautify” button in the screenshot below), easy-to-use editing tools, and even phone accessories that help users hold their phones in place while they’re shooting videos.
Lesson 5: Turn the comment section into a social hub
Some people say the only reason they use Douyin is to see its comment section, which has become a social hub where users interact. It’s often as entertaining as the video itself.
Douyin allows users to view a video and read its comments at the same time, so you don’t need to pause the video to see the comments
Lesson 6: Personalized recommendation is key
ByteDance calls itself an AI company, complete with thousands of engineers and its own AI lab led by former executives at Microsoft Research Asia. Its core competency is making use of machine learning and algorithms to determine what kind of content would appeal to particular users based on their past viewing behavior.
When you open the Douyin app, the default mode is a feed “recommended for you”. Unlike on Instagram, where you almost only see content posted by people you follow, on Douyin you’re shown content by creators you mostly have never seen before. In this way, you can constantly discover new creators, but almost all of them are making content that’s highly appealing to you.
Lesson 7: Where there is content, there is commerce
Douyin allows creators to embed product links into their videos, lending to a seamless transition from content to commerce. For example, an influencer called “Ye Shi Xiao Ge” (野食小哥), who films himself finding and eating food from the wilderness, has created his own line of food products such as a “Douyin beef sauce.” While you’re watching his videos, a shopping cart icon appears on the right-hand side of the screen to show the merchandise mentioned in the video, which you can then purchase with one click.
Lesson 8: Take it global
A year after Douyin was launched in China, its English version, Tik Tok, was launched in multiple international markets and quickly rose to the top of the App Store in Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea. Although its product interface is similar to the Chinese version, Tik Tok has also been localized organically by users in these markets, who integrated local music and culture into their short videos. For example, face painting seems to be a popular genre in Indonesia, and K-pop videos go viral in South Korea.
Having an international product also enable viral effects to spread globally
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