Toutiao Smart Writer

The Challenge: Automating Toutiao Content Creation

Creating content on Toutiao often involves three main pain points: First, the platform's algorithm strictly penalizes content derived from external news sources (like Baidu or Weibo), leading to reduced distribution. Second, its originality standards are high—content lacking personal commentary or failing to meet word count requirements (500-800 words for micro-posts, 1500-2500 words for articles) is frequently flagged as derivative. Third, the manual publishing process from drafting to browser submission is cumbersome and error-prone. This skill automates the entire pipeline to address these issues.

How the Skill Works: A Closed-Loop from Sourcing to Optimization

The skill provides a complete workflow:
- News Sourcing: It uses Agent Browser to scrape hot topics exclusively from toutiao.com's internal feeds, ensuring source compliance and avoiding distribution penalties.
- Content Creation: Based on the sourced news, it generates platform-compliant titles (with numbers/suspense words) and text. It enforces originality by requiring personal opinion paragraphs (e.g., “I think/In my view”), adopting conversational and emotive language to avoid an AI tone. A completeness guarantee mechanism ensures articles have introductions, subtitles, summaries, tags, and meet word count targets.
- Browser Auto-Publishing: Using a contenteditable injection method, it automatically fills and publishes plain-text content (not Markdown) into the Toutiao editor. It supports three modes: no-config (content generation only for manual posting), semi-automatic (confirmation before publishing), and fully automatic (scheduled tasks).
- Data Recovery & Optimization: After publishing, it scrapes metrics like impressions and read counts, analyzes CTR, and provides optimization suggestions, forming a “source-create-publish-analyze” closed loop.

Application Boundaries and Key Caveats

The skill has strict boundaries that must be followed:
- News Source Ban: It is absolutely prohibited to scrape news from external sites like Baidu or Weibo. All information must originate from Toutiao internally; otherwise, it will trigger content throttling, a core rule of its algorithm.
- Word Count & Originality Thresholds: Micro-posts and articles have minimum word counts (500 and 1500 words), and content must include substantial original commentary and analysis. Merely summarizing news results in low originality scores.
- Format Limitations: The Toutiao editor does not support Markdown, so output must be converted to plain text, using 【】 for titles and avoiding syntax like ## or **bold**.
- Environment Dependencies: The auto-publishing feature requires configuring Node.js, a Microsoft Edge browser, and a logged-in Toutiao account. For content generation only, the no-config mode can be used.
- Risk Controls: Pre-publish checks for account credit score, sensitive words, and posting frequency are necessary. The skill includes error retry and fallback strategies (e.g., saving drafts on failure), but anti-bot measures like CAPTCHA verification may require manual intervention.