Developer publishes guide to scraping 4.5B TikTok videos via private API
A technical post details how to access TikTok's Android API and offers scraped metadata and proprietary code for sale.
What to know
- A developer published technical documentation on how to bypass TikTok's protections and access its private Android API, claiming to have scraped billions of videos, profiles, and comments.
- The author is selling the scraping code for $699 and released 4.5 billion records of video metadata (captions, views, likes, sounds, country, posting time—not video files) to Hugging Face.
- Commenters raised concerns over DMCA takedowns, terms-of-service violations, the code's fragility to API changes, and questioned whether the guide itself was AI-generated.
- The scraped metadata is available free on Hugging Face, while the proprietary Go code remains behind a paywall.
The dispute Whether the $699 code purchase is worthwhile given the likelihood of TikTok API changes and potential legal action against the project. · positions read across 14 posts and comments
The dataset and guide face immediate legal risk and will likely be taken down by TikTok.
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“There's no way this dataset is going to survive on HF, right? It will be hit with so many DMCA takedowns.”
smallerize · Hacker News
The writing quality is poor and appears to be AI-generated, making the technical content suspect.
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“Can any brave soul wade through the LLM prose to provide a human-readable summary?”
Retr0id · Hacker News
The code is fragile and will break when TikTok patches the API, limiting its long-term value.
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“If Tiktok patches, the code will need updates too.”
moinism · Hacker News
kuben-developer / post author Developer
The record 1 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 13 voices from 1 site · best of 14 · verbatim
- Sep 3
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Very impressive figuring out all 4 checks. I'm not even sure this was reverse engineered, rather than leaked. I wish it mentioned anything about the methodology they used
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Well, most engineers are familiar with GIGO. Garbage in... Err, thats where my comment stops. Garbage in. Yup.
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1787990085 | X and Meta's past data scraping lawsuit losses and how it would relate to nitter | https://www.reuters.com/legal/musks-x-corp-loses-lawsuit-aga... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487864Perhaps Google can succeed where others like Meta and X have failed, or perhaps not
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Textbook example of what not to post on the internet. Unreadable incoherent LLM hallucination slop.
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"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.
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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.
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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*.
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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...)
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> Everything described here is a private Go repository. One-time payment, permanent access, complete source. > $699 one time · lifetime accessNot 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…
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I cannot verify whether it is technically correct, but it's about how to defeat Tiktok's bot filters to scrape it.
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>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.
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Can any brave soul wade through the LLM prose to provide a human-readable summary?
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There's no way this dataset is going to survive on HF, right? It will be hit with so many DMCA takedowns.