TikTok’s parent co, bytedance, has multiple social video products in China. They have been genuinely investing in being good at serving and recommending video f

TikTok’s parent co, bytedance, has multiple social video products in China. They have been genuinely investing in being good at serving and recommending video for a while. If you search arxiv.org for bytedance you can see some of the work they have published. I’m sure there is lots more they haven’t. I suspect a lot of learnings from other products went into the product design of tik tok as well in terms of how to balance exploiting a users knon interests with showing them novel stuff, how to give anything the chance to go viral etc.