ByteDance
More info
- Creator
- Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo
- Released
- 2012
- Type
- Internet company
- Website
- bytedance.com
The Beijing company behind TikTok, which worked out before anyone else that a recommendation algorithm can replace the friends list.
Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance in 2012, and its first product was the news app Toutiao, which didn't let users pick topics at all; it just learned from what they actually read. The same idea applied to short videos became Douyin in 2016 and its international sibling TikTok a year later, merged with Musical.ly in 2018.
The result forced Meta and Google to rebuild their own feeds around algorithmic selection rather than the social graph. ByteDance also runs a sizeable open-source operation, including the Rust-based build tools Rspack and Rsbuild. In the US, ownership became politics: a 2024 law required TikTok to be sold or shut down, and the saga since has mostly been a series of extended deadlines.