most Western social media apps must build a graph or die. This is because most of the most well-known Western social apps chose to interlace two things: the social graph and the content feed.

We'll look back at social graphs and say that it is a mistake to use the social graph to approximate an interest graph. The people you now don't necessarily reflect your interests.

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.

TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graph at scale because it doesn't really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is... See more