Douyin's Battle for 'Taste': Redefining Content Quality to Stay Ahead

Douyin, despite its super app status with over 800 million daily active users and significant revenue, faces intense competition from rapidly growing and profitable rivals like Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Kuaishou, and WeChat Channels. Acknowledging user fatigue with instant gratification and a rising demand for higher-quality, useful content, Douyin is undergoing a strategic shift to infuse "taste" into its algorithms and standardize "premium content" in an effort to secure its long-term dominance. This marks the platform's third major attempt at a strategic breakthrough.

Douyin's Super App Status and Intensifying Competition

• Massive User Base & Revenue: Douyin boasts over 800 million daily active users (QuestMobile) and its revenue surpassed Alibaba's China e-commerce revenue by one-third.
• Rivals' Significant Growth: Xiaohongshu and Bilibili both achieved over 100 million DAU and profitability by 2023/2024; Kuaishou reached 400 million DAU and sustained profitability; WeChat Channels surpassed 600 million DAU, comparable to Douyin's main app.
• Strategic Vulnerability: ByteDance management believes Douyin has not sufficiently differentiated its content quality from competitors and is not in a position to "rest easy."

Challenges in "Quality Content" and Evolving User Demands

• Past Failures in "Quality": Douyin's "Project L" (graphic content targeting Xiaohongshu) and the "Experience" tab (graphic content portal) largely failed to attract target users, with the latter seeing less than 1% user adoption.
• Youth User Migration: Douyin's original young user base is migrating to platforms like Xiaohongshu as Douyin's user demographic broadens, akin to generational shifts seen on platforms like Facebook.
• User Fatigue and Guilt: Extended usage of Douyin increasingly leads to "time wasted" guilt and even uninstalls, as users perceive short videos as "nutritionally empty."
• Demand for Utility: Users are increasingly seeking "useful" and "meaningful" content, with e-commerce and life services identified as key drivers for increased engagement, moving beyond mere instant gratification.

Algorithmic Evolution and the Pursuit of "Taste"

• Defining Quality Standards: Douyin is actively defining "premium content" by "drawing grids," identifying benchmark creators (e.g., Li Ziqi for pastoral style), and extracting specific "quality" characteristics.
• Algorithm Adjustments: Core algorithmic evaluation metrics (completion rate, likes, comments) are being re-evaluated; new metrics like "saves" and "follow-up searches" are now factored in to identify valuable content.
• Increased Human Intervention: The operations department, previously scaled back, now has a greater voice in defining "good content," marking a significant shift from ByteDance's traditional algorithm-first philosophy.
• Douyin Elite App: A standalone app, "Douyin Elite" (formerly "Qingtao"), was launched specifically for premium long-form videos, aiming for 10 million DAU by year-end, though its name causes user confusion with e-commerce.

Contrasting Approaches: Algorithm vs. Human Curation

• Douyin's Algorithmic Prowess: ByteDance's founder, Zhang Yiming, historically prioritized algorithmic recommendations, believing users shouldn't have to manually select interests to get relevant content.
• Rivals' Human-Centricity: Xiaohongshu actively suppresses industrialized/AI content and prioritizes "life quality," even accepting potential dips in user engagement; Bilibili focuses on "useful" and "category-specific" content, with human operators playing a key role in content judgment and community fostering.
• "Taste" as the Ultimate Factor: The article concludes by quoting Steve Jobs, implying that "taste" ultimately determines the right direction, suggesting Douyin's challenge is to imbue its algorithm with this human-centric quality.