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People have answered about the inherent easiness of preloading videos. It's still a challenge. Users skip videos very frequently, right? And when you first open
by hot_gril 4y ago
People have answered about the inherent easiness of preloading videos. It's still a challenge. Users skip videos very frequently, right? And when you first open the app, it already has a video playing. Twitter's video player seems worse than it should be. Netflix has a harder job due to the quality, so I give them a pass.
IIRC TikTok for a long time wasn't even using TLS encryption for client-server traffic, which is rare. Whoever is cutting corners like that is very focused on just making the thing work and fixing the issues later, which has its pros and cons. In a US big tech company, experienced devs would throw a fit over things like this and slow down the project to catch those details. I work with people like that. I'm guessing (as not a TikTok employee) that TikTok is more top-down, plus video is its main focus. Maybe they're preloading aggressively, user's battery and data plan be darned.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PeterisP 4y agoIf they weren't using TLS, I'd guess that this wasn't cutting corners but rather intentional to help caching. Ten people watching the same video can get the same data packets, ten people watching the same video over TLS have ten data streams with nothing in common.
- hot_gril 4y agoTLS is usually terminated at the CDN, isn't it? I actually don't remember. If so, it's not a problem for caching.
- nhecker 4y agoYes.
- acdha 4y agoCDNs usually cache the plaintext object rather than the encrypted stream. What I’d believe is that they started with a CDN which charged more for HTTPS support - I believe they used Akamai at one point, which would make sense since they had some of the best presence in China in the 2000s and into the 2010s and DEFINITELY charged noticeably more for HTTPS unless you could negotiate well.
- toast0 4y agoIt used to be not uncommon for some ISPs and corporations/schools to run transparent caching HTTP proxies. I don't know how much of that still exists, but anything helps.
- acdha 4y agoOne of the benefits of HTTPS everywhere was breaking the bad versions of those systems: I remember Vodafone ES having one which cached resources far longer (months) than the Cache-Control headers allowed, and mobile ISPs used ByteMobile to over-compress images. You still see opt-in proxies, which are at least better in the sense of the user being able to see the config & trust relationship when something breaks.
- hot_gril 4y agoYeah, feels good not having the ISP mess with that anymore.