By skyforbes 
Missed the prequel? Click here to pretend you didn’t: Byte Me: Surviving My First Year in the TikTok Hive as Engineering Manager (1)
The Blitzkrieg Playbook
Back in 2016, ByteDance quietly launched Douyin in China. By 2017, they’d already weaponized it for global takeover as TikTok — snapping up Musical.ly (America’s favorite lip-sync app) to instantly inherit 100 million U.S. teens. By 2018, it topped U.S. download charts; by 2019, it was the world’s most-downloaded app; and by 2020, it hit 2 billion downloads with 800M monthly active users.
Zuckerberg panicked and cloned it as Reels, but too late — TikTok hit 1 billion MAU by 2021, dethroning Google as the internet’s most-visited site. By 2022, it was hawking merch like a digital QVC. This wasn’t organic growth — it was a data-driven blitzkrieg.
- Cracking the Market with Algorithmic Addictiveness
TikTok didn’t just crack the code — it dropkicked the door down with a weaponized dopamine algorithm. While Facebook tiptoes around with its quaint little “social graph,” TikTok’s algorithm is a beast. It doesn’t care who your friends are — it cares how long your eyeballs twitch on a cat video. Three swipes in, it already knows your secret shame (mine: raccoons washing grapes). American teens open TikTok 19 times a day. That’s more commitment than most relationships.