Update 3: Just added Douyin: 1 in 4 trending videos on Douyin is educational. On TikTok I could barely find any

Douyin is TikTok's Chinese sibling. Same parent company, walled off from the west. Most tools skip it because the API situation is painful and everything is in Chinese.

We pull the trending videos and auto-translate titles and hashtags. 108,000 tracked in the last 3 days.

Since I create cultural, science and tehcnology content, Douyin is the proper network for this, misteriously it has more educational videos than Tiktok that is mostly used in the western. Why that could be?

On Douyin, roughly 1 in 4 trending videos was educational or cultural.

A forensic scientist reviewing movie autopsies.

Traditional glassmaking.

An AI game theory explainer.

Ran the same pass on TikTok's trending sample: low single digits. And half of those were false positives (a Messi goal is not education, no matter what my classifier thinks). People doing dances, people farming aura, lol.

Same company. Same format. Completely different diet.

I won't pretend I know why. Regulation, culture, algorithm choices, probably all three mixed.

But here's why I care: I run a science media brand, 8M followers. Educational content IS my niche. TikTok's trending page was always useless to me, pure entertainment top to bottom.

Douyin's trending page turned out to be a catalog of proven educational formats that haven't crossed over yet. The median trending video there has 1.1 million likes. That's the bar.

So the feature I added "for completeness" became the one I use most myself.

The roadmap keeps getting corrected by usage. Funny how that works.

Anyone else mining the non-English internet for formats or product signals? Curating this kind fo content from Asia is kind of a gold mine. Doing your own version and so. Did you know Douyin existed?