4: Chapter 4 is now officially available!

Three days passed in the blink of an eye.

During these three days, Zhao Lei and Lin Xiao practically lived at the company.

Following Qin Mo's instructions, they scoured the internet to collect, filter, and categorize over ten thousand Short Videos. Then, they wrote an automated program to register hundreds of accounts and batch-upload content according to different categories.

Qin Mo, meanwhile, continued to refine the details of the Recommendation Algorithm. He made some simplifications based on the recommendation systems from his past life to ensure the initial servers could handle the load, but the core logic remained unchanged.

Behavioral weighting, interest tagging, and collaborative filtering—these modules had all been initially set up.

Everything was ready.

On the night Douyin was officially launched, Jiang Youyou opened her Douyu streaming room.

As one of the most popular streamers on Douyu, her stream usually had three to four hundred thousand concurrent viewers, with a fan base consisting mainly of college students and recent graduates.

"Good evening, babies."

Jiang Youyou waved at the camera, a sweet smile on her face.

The chat stream exploded instantly.

"Good evening, Goddess!"

"Why are you so happy today? Did you find money?"

"What are you wearing today, Youyou? Let me see, let me see!"

Jiang Youyou smiled and changed the title of her stream.

"I'm not playing games tonight. I want to recommend something good to everyone."

"Something good?"

"What kind of good thing?"

"It's not an advertisement, is it?"

"Are you doing a sponsored post, Youyou?"

"It's not an advertisement."

Jiang Youyou said earnestly.

"It's a new piece of software my senior made himself, called Douyin. It's officially launching tonight, and I promised him I'd help promote it."

The chat went silent for two seconds.

Then, it exploded.

"Here we go again!"

"Is it that Qin Mo again?"

"Hahahaha, I'm dying of laughter. This is the third time, right? Youyou, hasn't your senior given up yet?"

"What was the name of that last software? I downloaded and registered, and it was dead the next day."

"I feel bad for our Youyou. You work so hard to help your senior, but it's all in vain every time."

"To be honest, I don't think Qin Mo is cut out for entrepreneurship. He should just get a regular job."

"Exactly, exactly. Youyou, have you considered finding someone else to pursue?"

Seeing this last comment, Jiang Youyou's face flushed slightly, but she quickly returned to normal and feigned anger.

"Stop talking nonsense! This time is really different!"

She glanced at the time.

"It's one minute to twelve. It's launching soon. I'm downloading it now, you guys do it with me."

Saying this, she picked up another phone and opened the app store.

Searched for "Douyin".

Downloaded.

Installed.

Done in one go.

"It's installed, it's installed!"

Jiang Youyou opened Douyin. A simple logo flashed by, followed by a black startup screen. The next second, a video started playing automatically.

On the screen, a little boy in overalls was standing on a sofa, eyes closed, his right hand loosely clenched into a fist held up to his mouth, his expression one of intoxication.

The background music was an old Cantonese song.

The little boy bobbed his head to the melody. When he reached the chorus, he opened his mouth wide, but the sound that came out was completely off-key, sounding almost like a cat in heat.

What was truly incredible was how invested he was. That look of intoxication, immersed in his own singing, created a huge contrast with his childish face.

Jiang Youyou burst out laughing.

"Hahahaha, this kid is so cute!"

She subconsciously wanted to watch it a few more times, but her finger accidentally swiped up, and a new video popped up.

This time, it was a husky.

It was trying to jump from the sofa onto the coffee table but miscalculated the distance. The dog sprawled out in mid-air and then fell straight to the floor, letting out a "woof" of distress.

"Pfft..."

Jiang Youyou laughed so hard she couldn't even hold her phone steady.

The chat stream went wild.

"Hahahaha, what is that?"

"This dog is killing me!"

"Where's the link? Where's the link! I want to download and watch too!"

"Wait a second, I came here to watch Youyou, how did this turn into watching her scroll through her phone?"

Jiang Youyou had no time to look at the chat.

She completely forgot she was streaming, her finger swiping up non-stop.

The third video: a little girl calling a stranger "Dad" on the street. The expressions of the passersby were increasingly hilarious.

The fourth video: two old men playing chess in a park. One tried to take back a move, and the other hit him on the forehead with a chess piece.

The fifth.

The sixth.

Jiang Youyou laughed until she was slumped over the desk, tears streaming down her face.

The viewers in the chat room were getting anxious.

"No, Youyou, say something!"

"She's completely ignoring us."

"I'm going to download it too, talk later."

"In my years of experience, this is truly 'forgetting home because of pleasure'."

"You guys go download it, I'll take a peek and come right back."

"I'm out, I'm out."

Then, the number of viewers in the stream began to drop at a visible rate.

Jiang Youyou finally looked up, glanced at the chat, then at the viewer count, and realized it had dropped by nearly half.

Under normal circumstances, she might have panicked.

But now, she just wiped away the tears from laughing and waved at the camera.

"Um, you guys go download Douyin first."

"It's really funny."

"Let's talk tomorrow."

After saying that,

she lowered her head and went back to scrolling through videos.

...

The next morning.

When Qin Mo pushed open the office door, Zhao Lei was sitting in front of the computer, the backend data on the monitor refreshing.

His fingers were trembling slightly on the mouse.

"Bo... Boss."

Zhao Lei's voice sounded floaty, like he was stepping on cotton.

Qin Mo walked over and placed the soy milk and fried dough sticks he was carrying on the table.

"What's wrong?"

"You... see for yourself."

Zhao Lei moved aside and pointed his finger at the screen.

Qin Mo leaned over to take a look.

The real-time backend data showed that Douyin's registered users had already exceeded eighty thousand.

From midnight last night until now, less than nine hours, eighty thousand.

For a new piece of software without any promotional resources or traffic entry points, this number could no longer be described as just "decent."

Qin Mo's expression didn't change much; he just picked up the soy milk and took a sip.

"Not bad."

"Not bad?"

Zhao Lei's voice suddenly went up an octave, his throat cracking a little.

"Boss, it's eighty thousand! Not eight thousand, it's eighty thousand! That local lifestyle software we made before only gathered ten thousand users in two months, and this one hit eighty thousand in a single night!"

Lin Xiao also crowded over, pushed up his glasses, and leaned close to the screen, looking at it several times carefully, as if to confirm whether he was seeing things.

"And it's still rising."

His voice was also trembling slightly.

"This growth rate is faster than any software we've done before."

Qin Mo put down the soy milk, bent down, typed a few keys on the keyboard, and pulled up a more detailed data panel.

Registered users: 84,000.

Active users: 62,000.

Average usage time: 23 minutes.

Zhao Lei was stunned.

"T... twenty-three minutes?"

This data couldn't just be called good; it was absurd.

For a piece of software that had been online for less than nine hours, users were spending nearly half an hour on it on average.

What kind of concept was that?

For many mature apps, an average usage time of ten minutes was already considered quite a good figure.

Lin Xiao didn't know when he had fished a cigarette out of the drawer and stuck it in his mouth. He didn't even bother to light it and said indistinctly.

"Boss, are we going to make it big?"