Douyin

Douyin (抖音) is ByteDance's mainland-China app. It is a different network from TikTok: different creators, a different catalogue and different trending topics. A video you find here will not be on TikTok, and vice versa.

Base URL: /v1/douyin/...

Getting started

1. Search for videos

curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/douyin/search?query=美食&limit=5" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Chinese, English and mixed queries all work, but Chinese keywords return a far deeper result set because that is what the captions and hashtags are written in.

2. Resolve the creator behind a video

Search rows carry post.ext.author_id, and every row's post.author block names the creator. To get their full record, pass their profile URL or bare sec_uid:

curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/douyin/profile?url=https://www.douyin.com/user/MS4wLjABAAAAtxsy7VmVkU3RN9oIX0vdkh_6-LlQAb0gwI-tDf-bYNg" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

This endpoint fetches no videos, which makes it the cheapest Douyin call and the right one to poll on a schedule for follower tracking.

3. Read a comment thread

Comments come back top-level only. To open one conversation, take the id of a comment whose engagement.replies is greater than zero and pass it to the replies endpoint:

curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/douyin/post/comments?url=https://www.douyin.com/video/7681266289940544369&limit=20" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/douyin/comment/replies?url=https://www.douyin.com/video/7681266289940544369&comment_id=7682735175344833317" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Every reply carries comment.parent_id set to the comment you asked about, so a thread reassembles exactly rather than by guesswork.

Douyin-specific behaviour

Four things about this platform differ from the rest of the catalogue. Each one is a property of Douyin itself, not of how SocialCrawl reads it.

engagement.views is always null

Douyin does not publish play counts anywhere outside its own app. Every source returns zero for that field on every surface, including single-video lookups, so returning null is the honest answer: a 0 would read as a video nobody watched. likes, comments, shares and saves are all real numbers and are what you should rank and track on.

Creators are identified by sec_uid, not by a handle

A Douyin creator is addressed by sec_uid, the opaque MS4wLjAB... string in their profile URL, or by their numeric user ID. Douyin auto-assigns a numeric "Douyin ID" to anyone who never picks one, and a number is not a handle you could mention, so author.username is often null. Join on author.id, which is always present.

Search always returns something

Douyin's ranker falls back to loosely related videos rather than reporting no match, so a nonsense query still returns rows and still bills for them. Read the captions rather than treating a non-empty list as proof of coverage. The single-video and profile endpoints do not behave this way: an unknown video ID or sec_uid returns not-found and refunds.

The hot-search board is the whole board

GET /v1/douyin/trending returns 抖音热搜, the live ranked list of what mainland China is searching right now. It takes no parameters and no limit: the upstream ignores any row cap, so the endpoint charges one flat price and returns the complete ranking rather than advertising a bound it cannot enforce.

curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/douyin/trending" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Topics come back in Chinese, exactly as Douyin publishes them, with no lossy translation applied.

Endpoints

8 endpoints available.

Notes

• All endpoints use GET with query parameters
• Authentication via the x-api-key header
• No Chinese account, cookie or VPN is required
• Responses follow the unified SocialCrawl schema
• Metered endpoints charge only for rows actually returned