[guptaneil]

I don’t have any unique insights into TikTok nor do I use the app, but TikTok has several product advantages over those other platforms:

1. They only have a queue of videos. That means there is one video playing and they know exactly what the next N videos are going to be, so they can start buffering them early

2. The video plays are high intent. If you launch TikTok, you are 100% going to watch videos. This is not true for Reddit or Twitter, making it harder for them to preemptively buffer content or over-optimize their architecture just for video playback.

3. As you noted, the videos are lower quality and shorter than YouTube or Netflix videos. They also are exclusively optimized for mobile, so don’t need to worry about streaming videos larger than a phone screen.

4. Most videos in your feed might be a similar style. This one is a stretch but I wouldn’t be shocked if TikTok uses some ML to extrapolate highly compressed videos early in the buffer.

5. Depending on who you believe, ByteDance might have financial backing and motivations that make it easier to throw more money at this problem than its American competitors.

[kossTKR]

Regarding 3. I've seen tiktok on an iPad and the quality is surprisingly good. High res and no artifacts. People can already film 4k with their phones, and that's what's shared.

Also young people scroll for hours (and adults, the average age is above 25 afaik) so watch-time isn't less than on YT, probably even more.

Lastly but most importantly, many people scroll through a huge pile of videos before watching even 10 seconds of an "interesting one" before doing the same thing over and over again, so in effect you are buffering a lot more video than on YT.

They must have absolutely massive infrastructure.

[dimmke]

I feel like I always comment on TikTok posts on here, but FWIW this is something I noticed early on about TikTok as well - the app felt well put together. There's even a web app that it is way better than it needs to be if you go on tiktok.com

I believe the videos are actually 720p, that may only be on mobile devices though.

I have strong and complicated feelings about how good UX/UI needs to be in software. It often gets ignored especially in B2B settings, but there are certain times where it's so clear how crucial it was to get something right. I think about Spotify compared to Apple Music and how Spotify had a way of preloading songs so they played immediately that Apple Music never quite captured. TikTok definitely had the chops.

The one big technical issue I have noticed with TikTok as a user though, is that their comments go down a lot. It's clear that comments are handled by a different service and it seems way less stable. It's somewhat common to be able to load videos but trying to load the comments leaves you with an endless spinner.

[sippeangelo]

In addition to buffering the next 10 or so videos in your feed, they also only buffer the first few seconds of each of them (likely driven by an individual metric of how quickly users tend to swipe off them, or how confident the algorithm is that you’ll be interested).

[nateb2022]

TikTok runs on top of AWS, and uses S3 to store uploaded videos. Each uploaded video is copied into several resolutions, copies of which are made available on each regional CDN.

[iKlsR]

This list is focused on videos but the search is what is beyond good, it's one of the best searches I've ever seen for content. You can literally use it as you would google. I'm assuming they transcribe their videos as well as run some object detection or image to text models that generate some metadata as to what is happening and or who or what is in a clip.

[ipaddr]

You are talkabout tiktok? The search is terrible. You can't order by date, no filters. Has this magically improved overnight?

[motoxpro]

You can't order by date or filter on Google either. I think the fact that young people use it over google as a search says something.

[weird_user]

Actually, google's paid search API can order by date, ascending or descending.

Checkout this example:

https://quackquackgo.net/?q=hacker+news&lr=&qqg-date=&qqg-ra...

[EnergyAmy]

I don't understand how the dates work on that. On the search you linked, the first result is an HN post with a date listed as "2000-09-18", but if you click the link, the post was from 3 months ago.

[weird_user]

This is probably because the HN page doesn't contain the document date metadata. So google just picked a random date from that page.

[viraptor]

I love this! Often when searching for some event I want the first report, not the spam that followed. Thank you for showing me this service.

[extra88]

You can order Google News by date and Search (at least in a desktop view) can be filtered to only include results from the past hour, day, week, month, or year.

[boringg]

Lots of people tagging the videos in the background for better algorithmic access.

[pjc50]

> ByteDance might have financial backing and motivations that make it easier to throw more money at this problem than its American competitors.

American VC can provide almost unlimited money. What it can't do is focus its spending on things that actually work.

The original question frames this in terms of technical talent, but it's not that at all. There are all sorts of US firms and even HN posters who could, given the right spec, come up with as good a solution for the problem of low latency smooth delivery of various videos.

No, the problem is choosing to make the right product. TikTok is good for the same reason that original Whatsapp was good: it had to succeed on its merits, rather than being part of a giant tech company. Whereas how many products has Google launched and then canned in that time? Was Stadia great technologically? Doesn't matter, it's dead.

Conversely, the Reddit video player on web is bad for the same reason that all the rest of the web app is bad: it's supposed to be, because of the dark pattern monetization that's supposed to force you into using the app.

[ActorNightly]

I think the idea behind Tik Tok being good is that it was designed with tech goals in mind, unlike monetization in apps based out of US companies. My bet is that Bytedance is building generative models for video/audio for propaganda purposes (with the government involved of course), and Tik Tok is essentially their data set generator, so they designed the system for throughput from the ground up.

[noobermin]

I'm sympathetic but remember failed start ups that too are trying to succeed[0] on their on merits are a dime a dozen. It explains somethings but not why they succeeded.

[0]...or at least until being bought out by the big players you mentioned

[jrockway]

Even ignoring these things, they seem to do pretty well. I only use TikTok by being linked to it, and the video always works. The same cannot be said of Reddit, which often just shows a spinner, or sometimes it gets stuck midway through the video, or sometimes keeps playing sound even when you navigate to a different page.

I think Reddit is just especially terrible. They had to write custom code for handling the viewport autoplay, and ... I guess didn't implement everything else correctly.

YouTube has been fine for ages, though, and have great keyboard shortcuts that no PM would ever think to ask people to add. They just added them in 2008 and kept them all working through 5 versions of HTML. Not bad.

[gernb]

The worst experience for me is trying to play videos in the google photos mobile app (or the website). It can take 1-2-3-4 minutes (or never) for it to finally play a video I uploaded from my phone a few days, weeks ago.

[WasDADO]

My god the google photos mobile app is oblivious, if I select a photo and make the mistake of swiping to the previous or next one, is game over for me, only a black screen awaits my despair. I have to close and reopen the app (same for web version) and then, only if I select the video/photo correctly the first time, after a lot of waiting, I can finally view my content.

[gardenhedge]

Yes! I've had the same experience but forgot to list it in my initial post.

[preciousoo]

The fact that they kept the keyboard shortcuts working is something like a miracle in tech

[MonkeyMalarky]

Expanding on point #4, the videos are much shorter than other platforms like say for example, YouTube, so for the same X minutes that a user watches or interacts with content, tiktok has more points of observation for what type of stuff the user likes and therefore can learn using ML much faster.

[sct202]

I wonder for me at least, why Instagram Reels is super blurry compared to TikTok, like since they should have the all the same conditions except for #5.

[Scaevolus]

Instagram uses DASH (chunked, adaptive streaming) and starts playing with a low res, and aggressively compresses video. Tiktok's api just returns a bunch of different CDN urls for different MP4s of the video (HQ often being 576P CRF24), and the client loads whatever bitrate it has detected it can load without hiccuping.