Why TikTok can cause cascading behavior
The link of the source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html, Why TikTok Is Rewriting the World, New York Times
Why TikTok can cause cascading behavior
TikTok is an app for making and sharing short music videos, originated from Beijing, China. Since its launch, its users has grown tremendously and quickly caused users’ cascading behavior on the internet. In class we have learned the possible causes of cascades and the threshold model that can be used to better explain the cascading behavior. This article from New York Times offers me lots of insights why TikTok in particular can cause cascades, particularly how to use the threshold rule derived from the payoff model to explain the reasons of cascades.
Overall, TikTok has applied many strategies in order to increase users’ payoffs when they use TikTok. Increasing users’ payoffs can lead to a very low threshold value that makes people to adopt TikTok or stick with TikTok. In order to simplify the model, I want to build a simple model between TikTok and one of its competitors, Instagram, to better illustrate my point.
In the matrix below, let’s assume that people face two choices. They make simple choices on either using TikTok or using Instagram with all others they connect to. The payoff for two people game on each edge is given by the payoff matrix below.
The article from the New York Times states several strategies that TikTok employed in order to increase the value of a and b, which will lead to a very small threshold value.
Most importantly, TikTok has successfully increase the value of b by creating “simulated temporary friend groups” for its each user. The article states that: “on most social networks the first step to showing your content to a lot of people is grinding to build an audience, or having lots of friends, or being incredibly beautiful or wealthy or idle and willing to display that, or getting lucky or striking viral gold. TikTok instead encourages users to jump from audience to audience, trend to trend, creating something like simulated temporary friend groups, who get together to do friend-group things: to share an inside joke; to riff on a song; to talk idly and aimlessly about whatever is in front of you.” In TikTok, it has provide every user a personalised “For You” page, which will continuously show up short videos created by company’s algorithms based on each user’s unique and personal information. By creating this “For You” page and many fun contends of trend, TikTok has created many online, virtual, and temporary friends for its users, so that users’ payoff will be high even he/she is the only one using TikTok among his/her real friends. That is to say, a user’s payoff will not decrease if his/her friends don’t use TikTok with that user. Back to our matrix, this means that the value of b will be large all the time; and the value of b can even be as large as a.
Besides, the article also mentions some other ways that TikTok uses in order to increase the value of a as well, such as its screen-size videos, its incredible easiness to navigate videos by scrolling up or down, and countless funny and fancy video templates. All these methods have been contributed to increase users’ payoffs of adopting or using TikTok.
The result of these strategies and actions have effectively increase the value of a and b. Let’s to more calculation to see how can these changes affect the value of threshold q, such that a person with p>=q fraction of their neighbours using TikTok will also use TikTok.
The calculation can be written as ap+b(1-p)>=cp+d(1-p); since 0< p<1, so 1-p >0, the increasing the value of a and b will increase the payoff of using TikTok, and, therefore, decreasing the value of p that satisfy this inequality. The value of threshold q decreases as well.
As a result, very few fraction of neighbours are needed to cause you to adopt TikTok. So, it is very easy for TikTok to spread so that very easy to cause cascading behaviors.