Where Did TikTok Come From?

So what I think TikTok did was the idea of a follower graph or a social graph, is completely non-existing on TikTok. The core product is an algorithm that shows you what you want, without you actually knowing what you want.

Shopping? A slam dunk, Douyin and Toutiao already enable a ton of commerce in China. Job marketplace? A bit of a stretch, but not impossible. If Microsoft buys TikTok, I’d certainly give the TikTok team a crack at improving my LinkedIn feed, which, to be clear, is horrifying. What about personalized reading, from books to newsletters to blogs? Musi... See more

Creating a UX where users had to decide on virtually nothing—and the app just learned from their behavior—was TikTok's monster idea in an otherwise crowded boneyard. Everything else about its product and network grew from the powerful way that it connected consumers to creators without explicit follow actions. 

This, then, is the magic of the design of TikTok: it is a closed loop of feedback which inspires and enables the creation and viewing of videos on which its algorithm can be trained.For its algorithm to become as effective as it has, TikTok became its own source of training data.