“This is the umpteenth time I’ve uninstalled Hongguo.” More than one friend has said something like this to me.

What is Hongguo? It is a microdrama app owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, and the fastest-growing product in China’s microdrama market in recent years. It has also recently found itself at the centre of a controversy over “ByteDance time”.

On Monday (26 October), prominent Chinese journalist Qin Shuo published an article on his WeChat public account titled “The Frightening Hongguo and Chinese Internet’s ByteDance Time”. It raised the question of whether China’s internet was moving from Tencent time into a new order of ByteDance time.

Citing data from Nomura Securities, the article noted that among China’s top 50 mobile apps by time spent in July this year, ByteDance-owned apps accounted for 40.9% of total user time — 11.8 percentage points higher than that of long-reigning tech giant Tencent’s ecosystem. Hongguo’s daily active users grew 107% year on year, with users spending an average of more than two hours a day on it, making it China’s fourth-largest app.

The article swiftly drew a backlash from ByteDance. Li Liang, a vice-president at its subsidiary Douyin, hit back in a post the following day, calling it “malicious praise designed to bring us down”. He also described the characterisation of “Chinese internet’s ByteDance time” as “utterly unrigorous and pure nonsense”. Qin and Li then traded several rounds of barbs online, with Li even using language as harsh as “either stupid or malicious”.

From a business perspective, there are practical reasons for ByteDance’s fierce response. The phrase “ByteDance time” puts a direct spotlight on the enormous advantages its products enjoy in users’ time, traffic and market power.

As China continues to strengthen antitrust regulation of the internet sector, highlighting a leading platform’s market share and dominance inevitably raises questions about whether its market power is excessively concentrated and whether it holds a monopoly.

There are already cautionary examples among China’s leading internet companies. Alibaba, Meituan and Ctrip have all received hefty antitrust fines for abusing their dominant market positions.

Beyond this, however, much of the criticism of ByteDance products such as Hongguo in recent years has focused on their “spiritual opium” effect. This may be the question ByteDance finds hardest to evade: when algorithms precisely identify users’ interests and habits, then feed them content without restraint, are they meeting demand and serving the public? Or are they exploiting human weaknesses to breed deeper addiction, turning that dependence into an ever-growing source of corporate wealth?

Qin’s article referred to discussions about how “Hongguo makes people increasingly stupid”. Topics such as “Hongguo microdramas lower people’s intelligence” and “Hongguo microdrama addiction prevention” have trended on Weibo. Yet none of these controversies has slowed the extraordinary rise of microdramas.

Media personality and host Yi Lijing, known for her serious, incisive and probing interview style, recently admitted in an interview that she was hooked on short dramas. Frustrated with herself for wasting time, she had “deleted that app countless times”. Nobel literature laureate Mo Yan also revealed that he spent four or five hours a day watching them, before suddenly coming to his senses afterwards and forcing himself to put his phone aside. Well-known writer Wang Shuo has struggled too, saying microdramas and short reels had left him unable to “sit through anything else”, and vowing to quit.

Many ordinary internet users have found a way to make peace with themselves through these celebrity examples: if even they are watching, what is there to be ashamed of?

This suggests that many people hooked on short dramas are well aware of their formulaic plots and lack of substance. They also know how much time they are spending on them. Yet they still cannot stop themselves from tapping on the next one, truly “trapped” in short dramas.

This contradiction is not hard to understand. The popular short dramas that top Hongguo’s charts — such as After Divorce, My Daughter and I Sweep Through the Demon Realm, Back from Retirement: This Bodyguard Is Not to Be Messed With and Posing as an Heiress at an Elite Korean Academy — almost all revolve around themes of turning the tables, the return of a powerful figure or a reversal of status.

They tap into the most primal human desires: a rise in social status, just rewards and a sense of control that is hard to come by in real life. ByteDance, in return, uses algorithms to amplify and reinforce these desires, monetising them to the fullest.

This week, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming regained his position as China’s richest person after a year. Like other leading internet platforms that rose before it, ByteDance has used algorithms to slash the cost of content distribution and lower barriers to it. This has given ordinary people more opportunities to express themselves and be seen, while helping many businesses, creators and even farmers find new ways to attract audiences and earn a living.

But like some other platforms, ByteDance also faces an increasingly evident tension between growth and social responsibility as it pushes technology and commercial efficiency to their limits.

Six years ago, there was widespread debate about food delivery riders being “trapped in algorithms”. Platforms were criticised for using algorithms to keep squeezing delivery times, making it increasingly difficult for riders to control the pace of their work. Today, internet users trapped in short dramas face a similar predicament: once their habits have been turned into data and precisely calculated, algorithms relentlessly compete for and capture their time.

As a company commands an ever-larger market share, how it manages the relationship between market expansion, corporate responsibility and social impact is a question that deserves greater attention and reflection.

This also reveals a company’s fundamental character and, to some extent, determines whether it can continue to earn the trust of the public and the market, and ultimately how far it can go. It is a question that every internet giant must eventually confront.