[mattnewton]

> However the reality is that what you see on TikTok really is a direct reflection on you. It's not an accusation, it's just an acknowledgement of the truth.

It's a direct reflection on what tiktok's algorithms think they know about you so far, modulo what they think they know about the contents of the videos they are showing. They have a good recommendation engine, sure, but it works on average over large populations through the limited funnel of video interactions, and their video understanding and inventory is similarly limited. This is even before considering that they clearly add some kind of extra exploratory weight to new content they don't have a lot of data about from you.

Their machine learning is basically fancy statistics on watch data, not a peering-into-your-soul Oracle, it's very possible it gets some people's preferences very wrong and is still profitable for larger population segments.

[valarauko]

I find my recent experiences with the algo amusing. It very heavily weighs new creators that I may have watched a single video all the way through, so much so that perhaps every 4th video would be old content (couple of months old) from this new creator. It gets super annoying super fast that I have to resort to blocking these individual creators (marking as "show less" does absolutely nothing for me). I also note that the algo seems to run out of interesting content for me after about 20 minutes or so - at which point the videos are further and further away from my interests.

[dillondoyle]

I feel like their ML is scary good.

Should maybe post on a throwaway but: it will show me the gay version of tit-tok, let's just call it putting a bunch of sweatpant season thirst traps in my feed.

Often videos with like 100 views or even less.

Their ML is likely categorizing d*ck prints, visible nipples, and a bunch of other human monkey brain dopamine drivers.

Instagram will recommends shirtless people. But TikTok takes it way farther. And probably a good reason it got so popular to begin with. People are creeping on kids.

[tough]

More on this point, there was a great article by the verge I think on how different tik tok was on the same city border ukranian vs russian.... wild war vs bliss