抖音海外版TikTok是如何改寫世界的

Hello, person who is, statistically speaking, a human adult aged approximately “millennial” to “boomer.” The analytics suggest a high likelihood that you’re aware there is an app named TikTok, and a similarly high likelihood that you’re not totally sure what it’s all about. Maybe you asked someone younger in your life, and they tried to explain and possibly failed. Or maybe you’ve heard that this new, extraordinarily popular video app is “a refreshing outlier in the social media universe” that’s “genuinely fun to use.” Maybe you even tried it, but bounced straight out, confused and sapped.
你好，一名從統計學上講屬於人類的成年人，年齡大約在“千禧一代”到“嬰兒潮一代”之間。分析表明，你很有可能聽說過一個叫TikTok的應用程序，同樣，你也很有可能不完全瞭解它是幹什麼的。也許你問過你生活中更年輕的人，他們試圖做過解釋，但沒成功。或者你可能聽說過，這個非常受歡迎的新的視頻應用“在社交媒體領域是一個令人耳目一新的異類”，“使用起來確實有趣”。也許你試過它，但因爲困惑和泄氣，馬上就放棄了。

“Fear of missing out” is a common way to describe how social media can make people feel like everyone else is part of something — a concert, a secret beach, a brunch — that they’re not. A new wrinkle in this concept is that sometimes that “something” is a social media platform itself. Maybe you saw a photo of some friends on Instagram at a great party and wondered why you weren’t there. But then, next in your feed, you saw a weird video, watermarked with a vibrating TikTok logo, scored with a song you’d never heard, starring a person you’d never seen. Maybe you saw one of the staggering number of ads for TikTok plastered throughout other social networks, and the real world, and wondered why you weren’t at that party, either, and why it seemed so far away.
“害怕錯過”是描述社交媒體如何讓人們覺得其他人都是某個東西（音樂會、一處祕密的海灘、一頓早午餐）的一部分，而他們卻不是的一個常用說法。這種想法的一個新特點是，有時“某個東西”本身是一個社交媒體平臺。也許你在Instagram上看到一些朋友參加一個很棒的派對的照片，你想知道，爲什麼你沒去。接下來，你在你的動態消息中看到了一個奇怪的視頻，上面有一個振動的TikTok標誌，配有一首你從未聽過的歌，主角是一個你從未見過的人。也許你在其他社交媒體網上看到了鋪天蓋地的TikTok廣告，並想知道爲什麼你沒有參加那個派對，爲什麼它看起來那麼遙遠。

It’s been a while since a new social app got big enough, quickly enough, to make nonusers feel they’re missing out from an experience. If we exclude Fortnite, which is very social but also very much a game, the last time an app inspired such interest from people who weren’t on it was … maybe Snapchat? (Not a coincidence that Snapchat’s audience skewed very young, too.)
已有好長時間沒出現過一款新的社交應用程序，在足夠短的時間裏變得足夠強大，以至於它讓非用戶感到他們正在錯過一種體驗。如果我們把同樣非常社交，但只不過是款遊戲的《堡壘之夜》(Fortnite)排除在外的話，那麼，最近的一款在沒有使用它的人中激發瞭如此大興趣的程序應用是……也許是Snapchat？（Snapchat的用戶也非常年輕，這並非巧合。）

And while you, perhaps an anxious abstainer, may feel perfectly secure in your “choice” not to join that service, Snapchat has more daily users than Twitter, changed the course of its industry, and altered the way people communicate with their phones. TikTok, now reportedly 500 million users strong, is not so obvious in its intentions. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have them! Shall we?
雖然你可能就是不想用這些應用，而且對自己不用Snapchat服務的“選擇”非常有把握，但那個服務的日常用戶比Twitter的還多，它改變了行業的發展方向，改變了人們用手機交流的方式。據報道，目前已擁有5億用戶的TikTok對自己的打算並不很明確。但這並不意味着它沒有打算！讓我們瞭解一下，好嗎？

The basic human explanation of TikTok.
用基本的人話解釋TikTok。

TikTok is an app for making and sharing short videos. The videos are tall, not square, like on Snapchat or Instagram’s stories, but you navigate through videos by scrolling up and down, like a feed, not by tapping or swiping side to side.
TikTok是一個製作和分享短視頻的應用程序。它的視頻是長條形的，而不是像Snapchat或Instagram那樣是方形的，你用手指上下滾動來瀏覽視頻，就像瀏覽動態消息那樣，而不是用手指左右掃動。

Video creators have all sorts of tools at their disposal: filters as on Snapchat (and later, everyone else); the ability to search for sounds to score your video. Users are also strongly encouraged to engage with other users, through “response” videos or by means of “duets” — users can duplicate videos and add themselves alongside.
視頻製作者有各種各樣的工具供他們使用：和Snapchat（以及後來所有平臺）一樣的濾鏡，還可以搜索聲音作爲視頻的配樂。軟件還通過“迴應”視頻或“二重唱”的方式強烈鼓勵用戶與其他用戶互動，用戶可以複製視頻，並把自己添加到視頻中去。

Hashtags play a surprisingly large role on TikTok. In more innocent times, Twitter hoped its users might congregate around hashtags in a never-ending series of productive pop-up mini-discourses. On TikTok, hashtags actually exist as a real, functional organizing principle: not for news, or even really anything trending anywhere else than TikTok, but for various “challenges,” or jokes, or repeating formats, or other discernible blobs of activity.
主題標籤在TikTok上的作用出奇地大。在相對純真的年代，Twitter希望通過一系列無休止的、卓有成效的、臨時起意的迷你話語來讓用戶匯聚到一起。在TikTok上，主題標籤是作爲一個真實的、功能性的組織原則存在的：不針對新聞，甚至不針對TikTok之外的任何流行趨勢，而是針對各種“挑戰”、笑話、重複格式，或其他可區別開來的活動集合。

TikTok is, however, a free-for-all. It’s easy to make a video on TikTok, not just because of the tools it gives users, but because of extensive reasons and prompts it provides for you. You can select from an enormous range of sounds, from popular song clips to short moments from TV shows, YouTube videos or other TikToks. You can join a dare-like challenge, or participate in a dance meme, or make a joke. Or you can make fun of all of these things.
但TikTok上也很混亂。在TikTok上製作視頻很容易，不僅因爲它給用戶提供工具，還因爲它向你提供各種各樣的理由和提示。你有大量的音樂可以選擇，從流行歌曲片段到電視節目、YouTube視頻或其他TikTok用戶的短片。你可以參加一個類似激將的挑戰，或參加一個舞蹈迷姆，或編個玩笑。或者你也可以拿所有這些事情開玩笑。

TikTok assertively answers anyone’s what should I watch with a flood. In the same way, the app provides plenty of answers for the paralyzing what should I post? The result is an endless unspooling of material that people, many very young, might be too self-conscious to post on Instagram, or that they never would have come up with in the first place without a nudge. It can be hard to watch. It can be charming. It can be very, very funny. It is frequently, in the language widely applied outside the platform, from people on other platforms, extremely “cringe.”
TikTok對任何人的“我該看什麼”的問題做出洪水般的果斷答覆。同樣地，這款應用也爲“我該發什麼”這個令人束手束腳的問題提供大量的答案。其結果是，上面有了人們源源不斷地製作的材料，人們（很多人非常年輕）可能因爲難爲情而不願在Instagram上發佈這些材料，或者如果沒人慫恿，他們壓根兒就不會想到製作這些材料。上面的視頻可能不堪入目，可能令人着迷，也可能非常、非常搞笑。用這個平臺之外廣泛使用的、來自其他平臺的人的話說，它上面的東西常常十分地“丟人現眼”。

So that’s what’s on TikTok. What is it?
TikTok上就是這樣一些東西。那TikTok究竟是什麼？

TikTok can feel, to an American audience, a bit like a greatest hits compilation, featuring only the most engaging elements and experiences of its predecessors. This is true, to a point. But TikTok — known as Douyin in China, where its parent company is based — must also be understood as one of the most popular of many short-video-sharing apps in that country. This is a landscape that evolved both alongside and at arm’s length from the American tech industry — Instagram, for example, is banned in China.
對於一名美國受衆來說，TikTok感覺有點像是熱門節目彙編，只展示最吸引人的元素，以及之前的類似應用最吸引人的種種體驗。從某種程度上說，事實的確如此。但必須清楚的是，TikTok——它的母公司來自中國，在那裏它叫抖音——是中國衆多短視頻分享應用中最受歡迎的一款。這一派景象的發展與美國科技產業並駕齊驅，又自成一體——比如，Instagram在中國是被屏蔽的。

Under the hood, TikTok is a fundamentally different app than American users have used before. It may look and feel like its friend-feed-centric peers, and you can follow and be followed; of course there are hugely popular “stars,” many cultivated by the company itself. There’s messaging. Users can and do use it like any other social app. But the various aesthetic and functional similarities to Vine or Snapchat or Instagram belie a core difference: TikTok is more machine than man. In this way, it’s from the future — or at least a future. And it has some messages for us.
實際上，TikTok是一個與美國用戶以前使用的應用程序截然不同的應用。它無論看起來還是在使用感受上，可能跟那些以好友動態爲中心(friend-feed-centric)的社交軟件一樣，你可以關注別人，也能被別人關注；當然，有很多大受歡迎的網紅，其中很多都是該公司自己着力打造出來的。還有消息功能。用戶也確實可以像用其他社交應用一樣來用它。但它與Vine、Snapchat或Instagram在審美和功能上的諸多相似之處，掩蓋了一個核心區別：TikTok更多的是機器而非人類。就這個意義上說，它是來自未來的應用，或者說，至少是來自某一種未來。它在向我們傳達一些訊息。

Consider the trajectory of what we think of as the major social apps.
想想那些我們視爲主要社交應用的發展軌跡吧。

Instagram and Twitter could only take us so far.
Instagram和Twitter只能做到這一步了。

Twitter gained popularity as a tool for following people and being followed by other people and expanded from there. Twitter watched what its users did with its original concept and formalized the conversational behaviors they invented. (See: Retweets. See again: hashtags.) Only then, and after going public, did it start to become more assertive. It made more recommendations. It started reordering users’ feeds based on what it thought they might want to see, or might have missed. Opaque machine intelligence encroached on the original system.
Twitter的走紅是作爲以關注他人並被其他人關注——並在此基礎上擴充服務——的工具。它觀察用戶對其最初的概念做了什麼，並將他們發明的對話行爲正式化（比如轉發功能，又比如標籤功能）。直到那時，在公司上市之後，它纔開始變得堅定而自信。它提出了更多的建議。開始根據用戶可能希望看到的，或者有可能錯過的內容，對用戶的信息源進行重新排序。不透明的機器智能侵佔了原來的系統。

Something similar happened at Instagram, where algorithmic recommendation is now a very noticeable part of the experience, and on YouTube, where recommendations shuttle one around the platform in new and often … let’s say surprising ways. Some users might feel affronted by these assertive new automatic features, which are clearly designed to increase interaction. One might reasonably worry that this trend serves the lowest demands of a brutal attention economy that is revealing tech companies as cynical time-mongers and turning us into mindless drones.
類似的情形也發生在Instagram上，算法推薦現在是其相關體驗中非常值得關注的部分。而在YouTube，推薦以一種新的，通常是令人驚訝的方式在平臺上穿梭。有些用戶可能會對這些自以爲是的自動新功能感到不爽，這些功能顯然是爲了增加互動而設計的。人們或許完全有理由擔心，在殘酷的注意力經濟時代，這種趨勢滿足的是那些最低需求。在這種經濟裏，科技公司是沒有心腸的時間販子，它們將我們變成了一羣沒頭沒腦絮叨的人。

These changes have also tended to work, at least on those terms. We often do spend more time with the apps as they’ve become more assertive, and less intimately human, even as we’ve complained.
至少在那些條件下，這些變化也往往是奏效的。我們往往花更多的時間在這些應用程序上，因此它們也變得更加自信，不再那麼有人性，哪怕我們對此有所抱怨。

What’s both crucial and easy to miss about TikTok is how it has stepped over the midpoint between the familiar self-directed feed and an experience based first on algorithmic observation and inference. The most obvious clue is right there when you open the app: the first thing you see isn’t a feed of your friends, but a page called “For You.” It’s an algorithmic feed based on videos you’ve interacted with, or even just watched. It never runs out of material. It is not, unless you train it to be, full of people you know, or things you’ve explicitly told it you want to see. It’s full of things that you seem to have demonstrated you want to watch, no matter what you actually say you want to watch.
關於TikTok，一個非常關鍵同時又容易忽略的地方在於，在熟悉的自導向信息源和一種首先基於算法觀察和推理的經驗之間的那個中點，它是如何跨過去的。當你打開這款應用時，最顯而易見的線索就在那裏：你首先看到的不是好友動態，而是一個名爲“For You”（爲你準備）的頁面。它是一個算法動態，基於你互動過的視頻，甚至只是觀看過的視頻。它有着取之不竭的素材。除非你對它進行訓練，或者明確告訴它你希望看到什麼，否則上面全是你不認識的人，或者你未必想看的東西。不管你實際上告訴它你想看什麼，經過訓練後的它，上面都是你似乎表現出來你想要看的東西。

It is constantly learning from you and, over time, builds a presumably complex but opaque model of what you tend to watch, and shows you more of that, or things like that, or things related to that, or, honestly, who knows, but it seems to work. TikTok starts making assumptions the second you’ve opened the app, before you’ve really given it anything to work with. Imagine an Instagram centered entirely around its “Explore” tab, or a Twitter built around, I guess, trending topics or viral tweets, with “following” bolted onto the side.
它不斷從你身上學習，隨着時間的推移，建立一個大致上很複雜但不透明的模型，來發現你喜歡觀看什麼，並且向你展示更多這樣的內容，或者類似內容，或者與之相關的內容，或者，老實說，誰知道什麼內容，反正似乎是有效的。TikTok會在你打開應用的那一刻就開始做出假設，那時你還沒有向它提供任何東西來供它使用。想象一個完全圍繞“探索”標籤建立的Instagram，或者一個圍繞着熱門話題和病毒式傳播推文建立起來的Twitter，“關注”是被捆綁在一側的。

Imagine a version of Facebook that was able to fill your feed before you’d friended a single person. That’s TikTok.
想象另一個版本的Facebook，它能在你加好友之前就把你的信息源填滿。TikTok就是這樣的。

Its mode of creation is unusual, too. You can make stuff for your friends, or in response to your friends, sure. But users looking for something to post about are immediately recruited into group challenges, or hashtags, or shown popular songs. The bar is low. The stakes are low. Large audiences feel within reach, and smaller ones are easy to find, even if you’re just messing around.
它的創造模式也不同尋常。當然，你可以爲朋友們製作東西，或者給朋友發送回覆。但是，想發佈內容的用戶會被立即招募到羣組挑戰和話題標籤當中，或者得到一些流行歌曲作爲素材。門檻很低。風險很低。大量的觀衆似乎觸手可及，而少量的觀衆也很容易得到，即便你只是在瞎鼓搗。

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. Feedback is instant and frequently abundant; virality has a stiff tailwind. Stimulation is constant. There is an unmistakable sense that you’re using something that’s expanding in every direction. The pool of content is enormous. Most of it is meaningless. Some of it becomes popular, and some is great, and some gets to be both. As The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz put it, “Watching too many in a row can feel like you’re about to have a brain freeze. They’reincredibly addictive.”
在大多數社交網絡上，向很多人發佈內容的第一步是努力建立一個受衆羣；或者擁有很多朋友；或者非常漂亮、富有、空閒，並且願意展示這些東西；或者特別幸運；又或者碰巧撞到能以病毒級傳播的黃金內容。相反，TikTok鼓勵用戶從一羣觀衆跳到另一羣觀衆，從一個趨勢跳到另一個趨勢，創建一些類似於模擬臨時朋友羣組的東西，他們聚在一起做朋友羣組做的事：分享一個內部笑話；即興翻唱一首歌；漫無目的地談論面前的一切。反饋是即時的，而且往往是豐富的；病毒級傳播有很強的推動力。刺激是恆定的。你會得到一種明確的感覺：你正在使用一種向各個方向擴展的東西。內容非常巨大。大部分都毫無意義。有些東西會流行起來，有些東西很棒，有些二者兼備。正如《大西洋》月刊(The Atlantic)的泰勒·洛倫茲(Taylor Lorenz)所說，“一口氣看太多視頻會讓你感覺大腦都麻木了，非常容易上癮。”

TikTok is just doing to you what you told it to do.
TikTok只是對你做了你讓它做的事。

In 1994, the artist and software developer Karl Sims demonstrated “virtual creatures” that moved in realistic ways discovered through “genetic algorithms.” These simulations, through trial and error, gradually arrived at some pre-existing shapes and movements: wriggling, slithering, dragging and walking.
1994年，藝術家和軟件開發者卡爾·西蒙斯(Karl Sims)展示了用“遺傳算法”發現的以逼真方式移動的“虛擬動物”。這些通過試錯得出的模擬逐步得出了某些已存在的形狀和運動：扭動、滑動、拖拽和行走。

But some early models, which emphasized the creatures’ ability to cover a certain distance as quickly as possible, resulted in the evolution of a very tall, rigid being that simply fell over. In doing so, it “moved” more quickly than a wriggling peer. It didn’t understand its evolutionary priority as “creature-like locomotion.” It needed to get to a certain place as efficiently as possible. And it did.
但是，一些早期模型更希望這種生物能夠儘快走完一定距離，結果製造出一種非常高大、僵硬的生物，只會跌倒下來。這樣，它能比一個扭動的生物“移動”得更快。它不明白自己的進化優先級是“像生物一樣的運動”。它需要儘可能高效地到達某個地方。它也確實做到了。

Older social apps are continuously evolving, too. Their models prioritize growth and discovery, of course, but also assume the centrality of your people: the accounts you follow and which follow you, or with whom you communicate directly, and are bound up in their founding myths and structures: Facebook’s social graph; the News Feed; the Instagram feed; Twitter’s rigid user relationships.
舊的社交應用也在不斷髮展。當然，它們的模型會優先考慮增長和發現，但同時也假定你的人脈圈子處於中心地位，也就是你關注的賬戶、關注你的賬戶，或者你與之直接溝通的賬戶，這一切都與這些應用的創始觀念和結構緊密相連：Facebook的社交圖譜；新聞源；Instagram源；Twitter極具原則性的用戶關係。

TikTok though is the towering stick falling far and fast, not caring to wait to evolve through a wriggling, cumbersome social phase, but instead asking: Why not just start showing people things and see what they do about it? Why not just ask people to start making things and see what happens? If engagement is how success is measured, why not just design the app where taking up time is the entire point? There’s no rule, in apps or elsewhere, against engagement for engagement’s sake. Let the creature grow tall and fall upon us all.
然而，TikTok就像是一根高高的大棒，它可以很快就倒下來，到達很遠的地方，它根本不想等待，不想通過一個曲折、繁瑣的社交階段完成進化，而是在問：爲什麼不向人們展示一些東西，看看他們會拿它們做什麼？爲什麼不讓人們做點東西，看看會發生什麼？如果參與度是衡量成功的標準，爲什麼不設計一個只需在其中花費時間的應用呢？無論是在應用程序裏還是在其他地方，只要想參與，那就沒有任何規則能夠阻擋參與。讓這個生物越長越高，然後砸在我們所有人身上。

In What Laboratory Was This Monster Made?
這個怪物是在哪個實驗室製造的？

TikTok is far from an evolutionary fluke. Its parent company, ByteDance, recently valued at more than $75 billion dollars, bills itself first as an artificial intelligence company, not a creator of mission-driven social platforms. TikTok was merged with , a social network initially built around lip-syncing and dancing and adopted by very young people. It still carries a lot of ’s DNA, and its app store reviews contain more than a little yearning for ’s return. It was the defunct against which the Federal Trade Commission recently levied its largest-ever penalty for mishandling the private data of young users.
TikTok絕不是什麼進化上的僥倖產物。其母公司字節跳動(ByteDance)最近的估值超過了750億美元，它首先將自己標榜爲一家人工智能公司，而不是使命驅動型社交平臺的創造者。TikTok與合併，後者是一個社交網絡，最初建立在對口型演唱和跳舞的基礎上，用戶是非常年輕的人羣。TikTok仍然帶有很多的DNA，它的應用商店評論裏也有不少人呼籲的迴歸。最近，美國聯邦貿易委員會(Federal Trade Commission)對這個已經不復存在的處以有史以來最大的罰款，原因是對年輕用戶的私人數據處理不當。

“ByteDance’s content platforms enable people to enjoy content powered by AI technology,” its website says. Its vision is “to build global creation and interaction platforms.” ByteDance’s wildly popular news and entertainment portal, Jinri Toutiao (translated as “Today’s Headlines,”) relies heavily on AI — not human editors, or a self-selected feed of accounts — to curate and create customized streams of largely user-and-partner-generated content tailored to each of its readers.
字節跳動的網站稱：“字節跳動的內容平臺使人們能夠享受由人工智能技術提供的內容。”它的願景是“建立全球創作與交流平臺”。字節跳動廣受歡迎的新聞和娛樂門戶網站“今日頭條”在很大程度上依賴人工智能——而不是人工編輯，也不是用戶自己選擇的賬戶源——來管理和創建定製的信息流，這些信息流主要是用戶和合作夥伴製造的內容，併爲每位讀者量身定製。

These are services where a sort of “filter” bubble — isolating users into worlds of points of view — isn’t an unintended consequence. It’s the point. And it’s extremely effective: Both Toutiao and Douyin have drawn attention from Chinese regulators for, among many other things, some familiar to any large social-ish platform, and others unique to its speech-constrained political environment, capturing too much user time. As a result, TikTok’s “Digital Wellbeing” settings include an option to enforce a password-protected time limit. The company’s other challenges can be addressed more assertively: an algorithm-first attention market isn’t just centrally ruled, it’s centrally allocated.
在這些服務中，產生某種“過濾”泡沫——將用戶隔離到不同的觀點世界當中——並不是一個意外的結果，而是關鍵所在。而且它非常有效：今日頭條和抖音都吸引了中國監管機構的注意，原因有很多，其中一些是任何大型社交類平臺都熟悉的，還有一些是其受言論限制的政治環境所特有的，然而還有一個原因是，它佔用了用戶太多時間。因此，TikTok的“數字健康”設置包括一個選項，可以強制執行受到密碼保護的使用時間限制。該公司面臨的其他挑戰可以用更明確的方式來表述：算法優先的注意力市場不僅是中央統治的，還是中央統一分配的。

Why Do People Spend Hours on TikTok? It’s the Machines.
爲什麼人們要花幾個小時在TikTok上？因爲機器。

All of this goes a long way to explain why, at least at first, TikTok can seem disorienting. “You’re not actually sure why you’re seeing what you’re seeing,” said Ankur Thakkar, the former editorial lead at Vine, TikTok’s other most direct forerunner. On Vine, a new user might not have had much to watch, or felt much of a reason to create anything, but they understood their context: the list of people they followed, which was probably the thing letting them down.
所有這一切有助於解釋，爲什麼至少在剛開始的時候，TikTok可能讓人迷失其中。“你實際上並不確定自己爲什麼會看自己正在看的這些東西。”TikTok另一家最直接的前身Vine的前編輯負責人安庫爾·塔卡爾(Ankur Thakkar)說，在Vine上，新用戶可能沒什麼可看的，或者覺得沒什麼理由去創建任何東西，但他們熟悉自己的環境：他們的關注人列表，正是這個列表提供的東西可能讓他們失望。

“It’s doing the thing that Twitter tried to solve, that everyone tried to solve,” he said. “How do you get people to engage?” Apparently you just … show them things, and let a powerful artificial intelligence take notes. You start sending daily notifications immediately. You tell them what to do. You fake it till you make it, algorithmically speaking.
“它解決了Twitter以及所有人都試圖解決的問題，”他說。“也就是怎樣讓人們參與進來?”“顯然，辦法就是……給用戶看東西，然後讓強大的人工智能做筆記。隨後立即給用戶發送每日通知，告訴他們該怎麼做。從算法上講，一直假裝下去直到成功。

American social platforms, each fighting their own desperate and often stock-price-related fights to increase user engagement, have been trending in TikTok’s general direction for a while. It is possible, today, to receive highly personalized and effectively infinite content recommendations in YouTube without ever following a single account, because Google already watches what you do, and makes guesses about who you are. And while Facebook and Twitter don’t talk about their products this way, we understand that sometimes — maybe a lot of the time — we use them just to fill time. They, in turn, want as much of our time as possible, and are quite obviously doing whatever they can to get it.
美國所有社交平臺都在拼命提高用戶參與度，而且這種參與度往往會與股價有關，它們朝着TikTok的總體方向發展已經有一段時間了。今天，你不需要關注任何賬戶，就可以在YouTube上收到大量高度個性化的內容推薦，因爲谷歌已經開始觀察你在做什麼，並且猜測你是誰。雖然Facebook和Twitter不會這樣描述他們的產品，但我們知道，有時候——也許是很多時候——我們只是用它們來打發時間。而它們反過來想要儘可能多地佔用我們的時間，而且它們顯然正在竭盡所能地得到這些時間。

So maybe you’ll sit TikTok out. But these things have a way of sneaking up behind you. Maybe you never joined Snapchat — but its rise worried Facebook so much that its prettier product, Instagram, was remade in its image, and copied concepts from Snapchat reached you there.
所以，就算你撐着不用TikTok，這些東西總有辦法悄悄湊上來你。比如說，也許你從來沒有加入過Snapchat，但它的崛起讓Facebook非常擔心，以至於它旗下更漂亮的產品Instagram對自身形象進行了重塑，從Snapchat那裏拿來了一些概念，最終還是來到你面前。

And maybe you skipped Twitter — but it still rewired your entire news diet, and, besides, it’s how the president talks to you, now.
也許你不用Twitter——但它仍然改變了你的整個新聞消費結構，此外，現如今你的總統跟你說話就是用這種方式了。

TikTok does away with many of the assumptions other social platforms have been built upon, and which they are in the process of discarding anyway. It questions the primacy of individual connections and friend networks. It unapologetically embraces central control rather than pretending it doesn’t have it. TikTok’s real influence going forward may be that the other social media platforms decide that our friends were simply holding us back. Or, at least, it was holding them back.
TikTok消除了其他社交平臺所建立的許多假設，而這些假設本身也已經處在被摒棄的過程中了。它質疑個人聯繫和朋友網絡的首要地位。它坦然接受中央控制，而不是假裝自己沒有這樣做。在未來，TikTok真正的影響可能是，其他社交媒體平臺都會認爲我們的朋友只是在妨礙我們前進。或者，至少，是在妨礙“它們”前進。