When a creator posted a video, TikTok showed it to a sample audience and then expanded to bigger targeted audiences if it did well—a form of a recursive publishing feedback loop. Creators with no followers could still reap rewards for videos that were funny and understandable by anyone. This was uniquely powerful for the medium of short-form video,... See more

I think one of the most important things is that we help new talent find an audience. I care a lot about large creators; I would like to do better than we have historically by smaller creators. I think we've done pretty well by large creators overall — I'm sure some people will disagree, but in general, that's what the data suggests. I don't think ... See more

It seems to combine Tumblr-style tribal niches with the brevity and intimacy of Instagram stories and the scalability of YouTube, where mainstream fame is most possible.

Facebook is context collapse - the social graph includes so many people. TikTok's social graph isn't built on a graph of people you know which avoids the context collapse.