Eugene Wei’s TikTok and the Sorting Hat is a splendid read on many counts. It provides some excellent perspectives on tech companies’ crossovers across WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) and non-WEIRD countries like China and India, made complicated by the culture difference. This serves as the context setting for TikTok’s rise in the US, and some deep chronicling on how this came to be, while juxtaposing it against social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. On an aside though, all of these networks have found varying degrees of success in India. Meanwhile, he points out that TikTok is not really a social network, because instead of a social graph, it plays on an interest graph that it builds from the user’s reactions. All of this makes for some excellent reading. But what really caught my attention was this –
in some categories a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted.
A meta example of this appears at the end of the post when he visits the Newsdog. At that point it was the top news app in India, and it was built by a Beijing-based startup. Around 40 male Chinese engineers, none of whom could read Hindi!
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