TechCrunch publishes an excerpt from ‘Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance’

Matthew Brennan and Rita Liao from TechCrunch publish an excerpt from the book Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance. Given that the recommender system of TikTok is considered one of its major success factors, the excerpt may be interesting for some readers of RS_c (though the excerpt has not a lot of details on the recommender system).

There’s no shortage of TikTok coverage in the news today as the app’s fate in the U.S. hangs in the air. What the press doesn’t always address is how TikTok gets here — how did a Chinese startup seize the lucrative short-video market in the West before Google and Facebook? What did it do differently from its Chinese predecessors who tried global expansion to little avail? Matthew Brennan’s new book “Attention Factory” set out to answer these questions by tracing ByteDance’s trajectory from an underdog despised by Chinese tech workers and investors to the envy of Silicon Valley and the target of the White House. Matthew has spent years working closely with China’s tech firms, not only analyzing them but also using their products as a curious local, experiences that informed his meticulously researched and entertaining book. Interwoven with captivating anecdotes of TikTok, rare photos of ByteDance’s original team, incisive analysis and telling infographics, “Attention Factory” is an essential read for those looking to understand how ideas in the American and Chinese internet worlds collided, coincided and converged throughout the 2010s.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/18/the-crowd-goes-wild-for-yiming/