4.5B Posts Scraped from TikTok

TTheOnlyWayUp about 2 hours ago 47 commentsRead Article on tiktok-api.seeksocial.io

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67% Positive

Analyzed from 674 words in the discussion.

Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago

Can any brave soul wade through the LLM prose to provide a human-readable summary?

simonw•about 1 hour ago

"I uploaded 4.5 billion of those videos to Hugging Face" = I scraped the metadata (title, view count, etc) for 4.5 billion TikTok videos using the same API as their Android app. I posted the data to HF as Parquet. The video content itself is not included. I'll sell you my Go scraping code.

arcfour•about 2 hours ago

Man, I could use $699. If this gets even a single sale, then maybe I need to try having less decency...

(I guess that is sort of a roundabout summary...)

echoangle•about 1 hour ago

Would you say that this is immoral? Since it’s data that’s public anyways, I don’t see why putting it in a table and selling it is a bad thing.

breezybottom•about 1 hour ago

What is "public" data? It admits to violating the ToS.

arcfour•about 1 hour ago

No, I don't care at all, but I recognize that my morals might be lower than others here. To me it's just public data...whatever.

My criticism was basically - this is trying to sell an AI slop project for $699 a pop - I could get this out of a few Claude Code sessions if I had the storage and network bandwidth to run such a scraper. The value proposition is questionable when the writing shows that the entire project was AI generated, and clearly Claude understands the way the TikTok Android app internal API works quite well...

405error•about 2 hours ago

I cannot verify whether it is technically correct, but it's about how to defeat Tiktok's bot filters to scrape it.

moinism•about 2 hours ago

> Everything described here is a private Go repository. One-time payment, permanent access, complete source. > $699 one time · lifetime access

Not open-source apparently.

And I cant find the reddit post but I think I read that videos/assets are not actually pre-downloaded, they have to be requested through Tiktok API using the provided code. So if Tiktok patches, the code will need updates too.

nomilk•about 1 hour ago

I think the post is essentially a decent technical-explainer (value adding and interesting) in exchange for effectively a little product placement (selling either just the code or code already running on a server at additional cost)

But I think this is the 289GB data (free): https://huggingface.co/datasets/kuben-developer/tiktok-video...

nomilk•about 1 hour ago

> Three things to notice, because each one bites later:

Very LLMish language!

405error•about 1 hour ago

It's that mix of dense, impressive sounding jargon, but even scanning across it raises glaring problems. Like, if you have 4.5 billion videos on HF, and it's 289GB, it's about 60 bytes per video. Checking the column fields as well, there doesn't seem to be any video files*.

nomilk•about 1 hour ago

There's an `is_video` column, perhaps containing a lot of 0's

405error•about 1 hour ago

More directly, there simply aren't any video files uploaded. It's just parquet files, which contain no video columns (I'm not even sure if it supports it).

vachina•about 1 hour ago

The AI keeps mentioning how a HTTP 200 can silently pollute your dataset. Why not just check contents of body? Usually APIs follow strict JSON contract for successful queries, alert or throw an error when that changes.

405error•about 1 hour ago

It's probably AI coded and hallucinated many things. That drumming up the importance of a minor thing is a real tell. Another hallucination - it hasn't found any video APIs (despite statements that it has and uploaded it). It has video metadata.

smallerize•about 2 hours ago

There's no way this dataset is going to survive on HF, right? It will be hit with so many DMCA takedowns.

simonw•about 1 hour ago

It's metadata only, not video content. I expect it will likely survive - that's a pretty common pattern for machine learning datasets.

Stable Diffusion was enabled by LAION, for example. That was metadata about images and URLs to those images, but not the actual image files.

deviation•about 2 hours ago

My thoughts also

magicmicah85•about 2 hours ago

>Is it legal? It is against TikTok's terms of service. It is sold for research and educational use.

Oh, ok. Otherwise, very detailed deconstruction to scrape their API. Lots of layers of registration and creating a request that looks like it is valid client.

ckugblenu•about 2 hours ago

This is being posted all over the place. on multiple subreddits and stuff. Why?

vachina•about 1 hour ago

Ads for an exploit

Retr0id•about 1 hour ago

Replicating client behaviour is hardly an exploit.

pr337h4m•about 2 hours ago

There aren't any actual videos in the dataset though.

smallerize•about 1 hour ago

The data is listed near the bottom, under "The 24 Endpoints" https://tiktok-api.seeksocial.io/#api

405error•about 2 hours ago

The first immediate smell is that if you have 4.5B rows and 289GB in data, you have ~60 bytes per row.

VulgarExigency•about 2 hours ago

Absolutely no consideration for the people who, when posting things to Tiktok, would prefer for them not to get scraped.

raver1975•about 2 hours ago

That data does not belong to the public. Why do you think it is OK to steal from TikTok?

theplumber•about 2 hours ago

Is this sarcasm on AI companies?

gdevenyi•about 2 hours ago

Like gazing into hell

VulgarExigency•about 2 hours ago

In 2026, everything we say, see or do on the internet is just another data point for some unscrupulous bastard to seek profit from.

igor_nast•about 1 hour ago

That's not true. I build an agentic IDE - indie dev tool. And it's for free and stays like it. I do it because I enjoy coding and the technology :)

https://shikigami.dev - more details here

igor_nast•about 2 hours ago

Is this even useful in any way?

tweakimp•24 minutes ago

You could use it as negative reinforcement to tell the next big AI model what it should not do

smallerize•33 minutes ago

Make your own recommendation engine. Even if it's just a real literal text search that sorts chronologically.

theplumber•39 minutes ago

Yes, train your model to give people more AI slop until they get sick of it