It seems nothing groundbreaking. A router, some middleware and websockets.
Also, nim is a mess. Very poorly designed language. I tried it a couple of years ago and was repelled by its syntax and attempts to solve every single problem for you.
Nim is just right down ugly and borrowed the worst from Pascal and Python. The multi-paradigm concept is a mess. Tried it a couple of years ago and moved on to better, more simple tools.
Exactly my thoughts on this as well. The brain and skill drain has reached levels of completely unethical. If someone did the same to America during the great depression 1920-1930, the U.S. would be a shithole country today.
They probably had worked on this feature for some time and are using the current times as an opportunity to introduce it. It's hard to believe they had the capacity to react to the traffic increase and develop a sharp new feature in less than a week.
Like most Hollywood productions, TikTok wants to show the healthy and the beautiful over the sickly and the ugly. This is purely driven by customer demand. The good news is that 1) TikTok a private enterprise and it can set its own rules and 2) it's in China so it won't be vulnerable to public shaming and social pressure to bend its business decisions to please fringe groups.
Most modern recessions are caused by investor fear and panic. In March 2020, if Elizabeth Warren gets the democratic nomination, you can expect a medium to deep recession caused by her high tax plan and business-hostile policies. You can gauge this by the high number of put option contracts with March expiration being purchased, compared to all other months.