[alangou]

Toutiao is solving the Internet's current most pressing consumer-facing problem - the discovery of relevant content.

It's a problem orthogonal to what Google solved earlier in the millenium, which is roughly "How do I find an answer on the Internet to a question I already have in mind?"

As the Internet has developed, the cost of content creation and data have decreased dramatically. And so the sheer quantity of content has exploded. Every consumer tech company has partially recognized this problem - Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Instagram, Snapchat, and Medium all want to recommend you relevant content, all have adopted feeds of articles and posts and pictures, and all desperately want your continued attention.

At this point, there's likely good content on the Internet for every single person's taste (like Anu said, there's a very long tail of content creators). The service that provides the most relevant selection of it will win consumer interest and usage at the largest scale.

And it certainly seems that Toutiao has leapfrogged everyone else in this regard. I'm very excited (but also a little wary) to see what they come up with in the future.

[flachsechs]

google absolutely sucks at it, probably because they don't see any value in it given their user base (everyone) and lack of competition.

i.e. my youtube front page just shows the same 100 video links over and over and over.

there isn't even a really good way to discover relevant content in the channels i've already subscribed to. it's pretty lame.

[samstave]

YouTube makes me want to punch my computer.

The related videos are never relevant, letting a child meander through YouTube invariably winds up showing my kids super inappropriate content. The YouTube mobile app sucks horribly (ios) I literally think that YouTube is one of the worst ubiquitous services there is.

[moron4hire]

This isn't a great solution, because kids are pretty good at getting out and into whatever app they want, but there is a YouTube Kids app. It's more like streaming TV than YouTube.