[wombatmobile]

> I'd be surprised if they were digging into the contents of the video at all right now.

Why would you be surprised to learn TikTok is doing video content analysis?

[blueblisters]

It can be a) very expensive b) also very difficult to implement.

Video understanding is an active field of research and I'm not sure state of the art is there yet for capturing nuance like engagement potential, categories etc.

[wombatmobile]

State of the art where? College? Silicone Valley? Bangalore? Shanghai? Beijing? Hangzhou?

[blueblisters]

State of the art in academia, which is largely location agnostic.

[xnx]

Google was able to build a very useful search engine that ran for decades relying on the significance of links and keywords, without much understanding of the meaning of page content. You can get very far with the readily available data, before you need to delve into the fancy stuff to make it a few percent better.