[pavlov]

There's also a heavy element of manual curation in TikTok. They have people putting their fingers on the scales to decide what content gets promoted. Where are those people, and what's their agenda? Who knows.

Releasing the recommender on Github is a way to try to diffuse that criticism. But it's just one part of the puzzle that is Tiktok's content distribution.

[yunohn]

This is true for all social media algorithms. None of them are purely automated and for good reason. You need humans going in and tweaking the outcomes to ensure users have a good experience.

Of course, when the conversation is about TikTok, this often becomes accusations of propaganda.

But YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter all exert significant control over their algorithms and things like their Homepage, Trending Topics, etc. The conservative right often labels such curation as liberal propaganda.

[pavlov]

Sure. HN is very actively moderated, and most people here probably agree that it’s worth it. (Those who don’t like it presumably don’t stay here.)

But at the massive scale of Meta or ByteDance, there is a difference between removing problematic content and actively promoting content. They’re two sides of the same coin, but the first is applied based on reactive guidelines (“we’ve previously decided this kind of content shouldn’t be here”) while the second is ultimately an in-the-moment opinion on whether more people should be seeing the content. The line is blurry, but these are not the same thing, and vibes-based content promotion is easier to manipulate.

Are there CCP agents working at ByteDance? Of course there are because it’s practically mandatory — just like American telecom companies have NSA wiretap rooms. Do those CCP agents get consulted on which foreign political candidate should get the viral boost? Perhaps not. But it appears they’ve built a system where this kind of thing is possible and leaves little paper trail because the curated boosting is so integral to the platform.

[yunohn]

> HN is very actively moderated

I explicitly did not mention HackerNews, as the homepage feed is primarily based on user voting - neither algorithms nor chronology. Dang’s moderation is not comparable to other social media platform’s feed curation.

> there is a difference between removing problematic content and actively promoting content

Again, there is sufficient evidence that all major social media platforms do exactly this, not just TikTok. Hence why I said:

>> The conservative right often labels such curation as liberal propaganda.

> where this kind of thing is possible and leaves little paper trail

Could you point to the paper trail that Meta, Google, Twitter provide on their curation actions? Otherwise, this just proves my point that people blindly want to accuse Chinese platforms of shady activities, and Western ones as paragons of virtue.

[PittleyDunkin]

> This is true for all social media algorithms. None of them are purely automated and for good reason.

Purely chronological sorting of posts works the best and is fully automated. It's just really bad at keeping users eyeballs on ads.

[yunohn]

I really don’t agree with this - chronological sorting favors larger/power users who spam their content through all hours of the day, versus smaller users that you probably care more about.

[dylan604]

If you don't have a way to manually push the algo, then you'd never be able to sell features like promoted posts and the like. And why would you not want a feature to sell?

[yunohn]

Ads can be inserted into any kind of feed, there is no difference between chronological and algorithmic. It’s usually a simple calculation of target ads displayed per posts viewed, with per user/advertiser caps.

[dylan604]

nobody said anything about ads

[yunohn]

What do you think a promoted post is? It’s an ad based on “user generated content”.

[davidjfelix]

> They have people putting their fingers on the scales to decide what content gets promoted.

Is this just your belief or is there evidence you can point to.

How would you differentiate manual intervention from algorithmic intervention?

[rolandog]

It was previously discussed in HN [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480003