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，一名从统计学上讲属于人类的成年人，年龄大约在“千禧一代”到“婴儿潮一代”之间。分析表明，你很有可能听说过一个叫TikTok的应用程序，同样，你也很有可能不完全了解它是干什么的。也许你问过你生活中更年轻的人，他们试图做过解释，但没成功。或者你可能听说过，这个非常受欢迎的新的视频应用“在社交媒体领域是一个令人耳目一新的异类”，“使用起来确实有趣”。也许你试过它，但因为困惑和泄气，马上就放弃了。

“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.
“害怕错过”是描述社交媒体如何让人们觉得其他人都是某个东西（音乐会、一处秘密的海滩、一顿早午餐）的一部分，而他们却不是的一个常用说法。这种想法的一个新特点是，有时“某个东西”本身是一个社交媒体平台。也许你在Instagram上看到一些朋友参加一个很棒的派对的照片，你想知道，为什么你没去。接下来，你在你的动态消息中看到了一个奇怪的视频，上面有一个振动的TikTok标志，配有一首你从未听过的歌，主角是一个你从未见过的人。也许你在其他社交媒体网上看到了铺天盖地的TikTok广告，并想知道为什么你没有参加那个派对，为什么它看起来那么遥远。

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.)
已有好长时间没出现过一款新的社交应用程序，在足够短的时间里变得足够强大，以至于它让非用户感到他们正在错过一种体验。如果我们把同样非常社交，但只不过是款游戏的《堡垒之夜》(Fortnite)排除在外的话，那么，最近的一款在没有使用它的人中激发了如此大兴趣的程序应用是……也许是Snapchat？（Snapchat的用户也非常年轻，这并非巧合。）

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?
虽然你可能就是不想用这些应用，而且对自己不用Snapchat服务的“选择”非常有把握，但那个服务的日常用户比Twitter的还多，它改变了行业的发展方向，改变了人们用手机交流的方式。据报道，目前已拥有5亿用户的TikTok对自己的打算并不很明确。但这并不意味着它没有打算！让我们了解一下，好吗？

The basic human explanation of TikTok.
用基本的人话解释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是一个制作和分享短视频的应用程序。它的视频是长条形的，而不是像Snapchat或Instagram那样是方形的，你用手指上下滚动来浏览视频，就像浏览动态消息那样，而不是用手指左右扫动。

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.
视频制作者有各种各样的工具供他们使用：和Snapchat（以及后来所有平台）一样的滤镜，还可以搜索声音作为视频的配乐。软件还通过“回应”视频或“二重唱”的方式强烈鼓励用户与其他用户互动，用户可以复制视频，并把自己添加到视频中去。

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.
主题标签在TikTok上的作用出奇地大。在相对纯真的年代，Twitter希望通过一系列无休止的、卓有成效的、临时起意的迷你话语来让用户汇聚到一起。在TikTok上，主题标签是作为一个真实的、功能性的组织原则存在的：不针对新闻，甚至不针对TikTok之外的任何流行趋势，而是针对各种“挑战”、笑话、重复格式，或其他可区别开来的活动集合。

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上也很混乱。在TikTok上制作视频很容易，不仅因为它给用户提供工具，还因为它向你提供各种各样的理由和提示。你有大量的音乐可以选择，从流行歌曲片段到电视节目、YouTube视频或其他TikTok用户的短片。你可以参加一个类似激将的挑战，或参加一个舞蹈迷姆，或编个玩笑。或者你也可以拿所有这些事情开玩笑。

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对任何人的“我该看什么”的问题做出洪水般的果断答复。同样地，这款应用也为“我该发什么”这个令人束手束脚的问题提供大量的答案。其结果是，上面有了人们源源不断地制作的材料，人们（很多人非常年轻）可能因为难为情而不愿在Instagram上发布这些材料，或者如果没人怂恿，他们压根儿就不会想到制作这些材料。上面的视频可能不堪入目，可能令人着迷，也可能非常、非常搞笑。用这个平台之外广泛使用的、来自其他平台的人的话说，它上面的东西常常十分地“丢人现眼”。

So that’s what’s on TikTok. What is it?
TikTok上就是这样一些东西。那TikTok究竟是什么？

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.
对于一名美国受众来说，TikTok感觉有点像是热门节目汇编，只展示最吸引人的元素，以及之前的类似应用最吸引人的种种体验。从某种程度上说，事实的确如此。但必须清楚的是，TikTok——它的母公司来自中国，在那里它叫抖音——是中国众多短视频分享应用中最受欢迎的一款。这一派景象的发展与美国科技产业并驾齐驱，又自成一体——比如，Instagram在中国是被屏蔽的。

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.
实际上，TikTok是一个与美国用户以前使用的应用程序截然不同的应用。它无论看起来还是在使用感受上，可能跟那些以好友动态为中心(friend-feed-centric)的社交软件一样，你可以关注别人，也能被别人关注；当然，有很多大受欢迎的网红，其中很多都是该公司自己着力打造出来的。还有消息功能。用户也确实可以像用其他社交应用一样来用它。但它与Vine、Snapchat或Instagram在审美和功能上的诸多相似之处，掩盖了一个核心区别：TikTok更多的是机器而非人类。就这个意义上说，它是来自未来的应用，或者说，至少是来自某一种未来。它在向我们传达一些讯息。

Consider the trajectory of what we think of as the major social apps.
想想那些我们视为主要社交应用的发展轨迹吧。

Instagram and Twitter could only take us so far.
Instagram和Twitter只能做到这一步了。

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的走红是作为以关注他人并被其他人关注——并在此基础上扩充服务——的工具。它观察用户对其最初的概念做了什么，并将他们发明的对话行为正式化（比如转发功能，又比如标签功能）。直到那时，在公司上市之后，它才开始变得坚定而自信。它提出了更多的建议。开始根据用户可能希望看到的，或者有可能错过的内容，对用户的信息源进行重新排序。不透明的机器智能侵占了原来的系统。

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.
类似的情形也发生在Instagram上，算法推荐现在是其相关体验中非常值得关注的部分。而在YouTube，推荐以一种新的，通常是令人惊讶的方式在平台上穿梭。有些用户可能会对这些自以为是的自动新功能感到不爽，这些功能显然是为了增加互动而设计的。人们或许完全有理由担心，在残酷的注意力经济时代，这种趋势满足的是那些最低需求。在这种经济里，科技公司是没有心肠的时间贩子，它们将我们变成了一群没头没脑絮叨的人。

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.
至少在那些条件下，这些变化也往往是奏效的。我们往往花更多的时间在这些应用程序上，因此它们也变得更加自信，不再那么有人性，哪怕我们对此有所抱怨。

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.
关于TikTok，一个非常关键同时又容易忽略的地方在于，在熟悉的自导向信息源和一种首先基于算法观察和推理的经验之间的那个中点，它是如何跨过去的。当你打开这款应用时，最显而易见的线索就在那里：你首先看到的不是好友动态，而是一个名为“For You”（为你准备）的页面。它是一个算法动态，基于你互动过的视频，甚至只是观看过的视频。它有着取之不竭的素材。除非你对它进行训练，或者明确告诉它你希望看到什么，否则上面全是你不认识的人，或者你未必想看的东西。不管你实际上告诉它你想看什么，经过训练后的它，上面都是你似乎表现出来你想要看的东西。

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.
它不断从你身上学习，随着时间的推移，建立一个大致上很复杂但不透明的模型，来发现你喜欢观看什么，并且向你展示更多这样的内容，或者类似内容，或者与之相关的内容，或者，老实说，谁知道什么内容，反正似乎是有效的。TikTok会在你打开应用的那一刻就开始做出假设，那时你还没有向它提供任何东西来供它使用。想象一个完全围绕“探索”标签建立的Instagram，或者一个围绕着热门话题和病毒式传播推文建立起来的Twitter，“关注”是被捆绑在一侧的。

Imagine a version of Facebook that was able to fill your feed before you’d friended a single person. That’s TikTok.
想象另一个版本的Facebook，它能在你加好友之前就把你的信息源填满。TikTok就是这样的。

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.
它的创造模式也不同寻常。当然，你可以为朋友们制作东西，或者给朋友发送回复。但是，想发布内容的用户会被立即招募到群组挑战和话题标签当中，或者得到一些流行歌曲作为素材。门槛很低。风险很低。大量的观众似乎触手可及，而少量的观众也很容易得到，即便你只是在瞎鼓捣。

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.”
在大多数社交网络上，向很多人发布内容的第一步是努力建立一个受众群；或者拥有很多朋友；或者非常漂亮、富有、空闲，并且愿意展示这些东西；或者特别幸运；又或者碰巧撞到能以病毒级传播的黄金内容。相反，TikTok鼓励用户从一群观众跳到另一群观众，从一个趋势跳到另一个趋势，创建一些类似于模拟临时朋友群组的东西，他们聚在一起做朋友群组做的事：分享一个内部笑话；即兴翻唱一首歌；漫无目的地谈论面前的一切。反馈是即时的，而且往往是丰富的；病毒级传播有很强的推动力。刺激是恒定的。你会得到一种明确的感觉：你正在使用一种向各个方向扩展的东西。内容非常巨大。大部分都毫无意义。有些东西会流行起来，有些东西很棒，有些二者兼备。正如《大西洋》月刊(The Atlantic)的泰勒·洛伦兹(Taylor Lorenz)所说，“一口气看太多视频会让你感觉大脑都麻木了，非常容易上瘾。”

TikTok is just doing to you what you told it to do.
TikTok只是对你做了你让它做的事。

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，艺术家和软件开发者卡尔·西蒙斯(Karl Sims)展示了用“遗传算法”发现的以逼真方式移动的“虚拟动物”。这些通过试错得出的模拟逐步得出了某些已存在的形状和运动：扭动、滑动、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这种生物能够尽快走完一定距离，结果制造出一种非常高大、僵硬的生物，只会跌倒下来。这样，它能比一个扭动的生物“移动”得更快。它不明白自己的进化优先级是“像生物一样的运动”。它需要尽可能高效地到达某个地方。它也确实做到了。

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.
旧的社交应用也在不断发展。当然，它们的模型会优先考虑增长和发现，但同时也假定你的人脉圈子处于中心地位，也就是你关注的账户、关注你的账户，或者你与之直接沟通的账户，这一切都与这些应用的创始观念和结构紧密相连：Facebook的社交图谱；新闻源；Instagram源；Twitter极具原则性的用户关系。

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，它可以很快就倒下来，到达很远的地方，它根本不想等待，不想通过一个曲折、繁琐的社交阶段完成进化，而是在问：为什么不向人们展示一些东西，看看他们会拿它们做什么？为什么不让人们做点东西，看看会发生什么？如果参与度是衡量成功的标准，为什么不设计一个只需在其中花费时间的应用呢？无论是在应用程序里还是在其他地方，只要想参与，那就没有任何规则能够阻挡参与。让这个生物越长越高，然后砸在我们所有人身上。

In What Laboratory Was This Monster Made?
这个怪物是在哪个实验室制造的？

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 Musical.ly, a social network initially built around lip-syncing and dancing and adopted by very young people. It still carries a lot of Musical.ly’s DNA, and its app store reviews contain more than a little yearning for Musical.ly’s return. It was the defunct Musical.ly against which the Federal Trade Commission recently levied its largest-ever penalty for mishandling the private data of young users.
TikTok绝不是什么进化上的侥幸产物。其母公司字节跳动(ByteDance)最近的估值超过了750亿美元，它首先将自己标榜为一家人工智能公司，而不是使命驱动型社交平台的创造者。TikTok与Musical.ly合并，后者是一个社交网络，最初建立在对口型演唱和跳舞的基础上，用户是非常年轻的人群。TikTok仍然带有很多Musical.ly的DNA，它的应用商店评论里也有不少人呼吁Musical.ly的回归。最近，美国联邦贸易委员会(Federal Trade Commission)对这个已经不复存在的Musical.ly处以有史以来最大的罚款，原因是对年轻用户的私人数据处理不当。

“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.
字节跳动的网站称：“字节跳动的内容平台使人们能够享受由人工智能技术提供的内容。”它的愿景是“建立全球创作与交流平台”。字节跳动广受欢迎的新闻和娱乐门户网站“今日头条”在很大程度上依赖人工智能——而不是人工编辑，也不是用户自己选择的账户源——来管理和创建定制的信息流，这些信息流主要是用户和合作伙伴制造的内容，并为每位读者量身定制。

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.
在这些服务中，产生某种“过滤”泡沫——将用户隔离到不同的观点世界当中——并不是一个意外的结果，而是关键所在。而且它非常有效：今日头条和抖音都吸引了中国监管机构的注意，原因有很多，其中一些是任何大型社交类平台都熟悉的，还有一些是其受言论限制的政治环境所特有的，然而还有一个原因是，它占用了用户太多时间。因此，TikTok的“数字健康”设置包括一个选项，可以强制执行受到密码保护的使用时间限制。该公司面临的其他挑战可以用更明确的方式来表述：算法优先的注意力市场不仅是中央统治的，还是中央统一分配的。

Why Do People Spend Hours on TikTok? It’s the Machines.
为什么人们要花几个小时在TikTok上？因为机器。

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.
所有这一切有助于解释，为什么至少在刚开始的时候，TikTok可能让人迷失其中。“你实际上并不确定自己为什么会看自己正在看的这些东西。”TikTok另一家最直接的前身Vine的前编辑负责人安库尔·塔卡尔(Ankur Thakkar)说，在Vine上，新用户可能没什么可看的，或者觉得没什么理由去创建任何东西，但他们熟悉自己的环境：他们的关注人列表，正是这个列表提供的东西可能让他们失望。

“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.
“它解决了Twitter以及所有人都试图解决的问题，”他说。“也就是怎样让人们参与进来?”“显然，办法就是……给用户看东西，然后让强大的人工智能做笔记。随后立即给用户发送每日通知，告诉他们该怎么做。从算法上讲，一直假装下去直到成功。

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.
美国所有社交平台都在拼命提高用户参与度，而且这种参与度往往会与股价有关，它们朝着TikTok的总体方向发展已经有一段时间了。今天，你不需要关注任何账户，就可以在YouTube上收到大量高度个性化的内容推荐，因为谷歌已经开始观察你在做什么，并且猜测你是谁。虽然Facebook和Twitter不会这样描述他们的产品，但我们知道，有时候——也许是很多时候——我们只是用它们来打发时间。而它们反过来想要尽可能多地占用我们的时间，而且它们显然正在竭尽所能地得到这些时间。

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，就算你撑着不用TikTok，这些东西总有办法悄悄凑上来你。比如说，也许你从来没有加入过Snapchat，但它的崛起让Facebook非常担心，以至于它旗下更漂亮的产品Instagram对自身形象进行了重塑，从Snapchat那里拿来了一些概念，最终还是来到你面前。

And maybe you skipped Twitter — but it still rewired your entire news diet, and, besides, it’s how the president talks to you, now.
也许你不用Twitter——但它仍然改变了你的整个新闻消费结构，此外，现如今你的总统跟你说话就是用这种方式了。

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消除了其他社交平台所建立的许多假设，而这些假设本身也已经处在被摒弃的过程中了。它质疑个人联系和朋友网络的首要地位。它坦然接受中央控制，而不是假装自己没有这样做。在未来，TikTok真正的影响可能是，其他社交媒体平台都会认为我们的朋友只是在妨碍我们前进。或者，至少，是在妨碍“它们”前进。