For me, Tiktok somehow shows videos that are just “right”. Maybe it is length of videos and ux. I skip anything boring in first 2-3 seconds and probably that’s how other people use it too. So creators have to make their videos entertaining from the first second.
And also videos somehow are relevant to current situation in my life. For example, if I have a tight deadline at work, Tiktok will show me videos related to work, productivity, mocking deadlines, etc. Not sure if it is just the numbers game since you can go through 10s of videos in a few minutes. And you just remember videos that were right or if their algorithm is really that good.
Tagging along, the TikTok algorithm adapts to which videos you skip. It's unfair to claim that the platform has poor quality content without spending at least some time browsing, much more than 5 minutes
> The vast majority of TikTok's are extremely clickbait-y and entice you to watch till the end without you knowing if there will be a payoff
TikTok added a progress bar so you can skip to the end in those cases and save yourself the time now.
Or, you can just scroll past those videos. Again, the reason they're clickbaity is because your brain thinks there's going to be a payoff, but if you train you brain to instantly scroll past those videos then you'll also train the algorithm to show less of those kinds of videos.
Yeah I wish TikTok has variable speed / fast forward option. Another factor for ML to train and automatically speed up to the juicy bits. There's a lot of room to waste even in 1 minute formats. Though TikTok itself is mostly time wasting and this remark is more an indictment of my attention span.
I don't know if TikTok has a better discovery algorithm - I think its just able to feed you with more videos in a set of time. A 1 minute average video time lets you recommend 10 times more videos than a platform with a 10 minute average video.
It's not about missing out but you get sucked in and there's no end. I don't use TikTok myself but I've gotten stuck with YouTube Shorts where 45 min easily fly by despite me disliking it. On all other social media platforms you reach the end and see content you read yesterday. On these video platforms it just goes on and on. Short videos are also a very digestable format.
This was my first experience using TikTok as well — I think those videos will always appear to new users because they get a lot of engagement. But if you swipe past them quickly, you'll likely never see them again.
Expanding on point #4, the videos are much shorter than other platforms like say for example, YouTube, so for the same X minutes that a user watches or interacts with content, tiktok has more points of observation for what type of stuff the user likes and therefore can learn using ML much faster.
TikTok is like a highly compressed version of YouTube.
YouTube incentivizes creators to make artificially long videos, resulting in a huge amount of filler. So you get a lot of videos where you can skip the first 20%+ and not miss anything. The content is buried and spread out.
1 minute of content surrounded by 9 minutes of filler.
TikTok removed those 9 minutes, so it feels very refreshing in that respect. There's no incentive to create filler - just the opposite.
Of course the downside is that there's only so much you can fit into a 60 second package, so you're not going to get a deep dive into anything. But for the kind of content that can be compressed like that, TikTok wins big time.
There's no fixed time cost, every video can be skipped (swiped) within the first milliseconds. I agree repeated jokes can be boring but it's really easy to skip. I also don't like videos that pick the influencer style "Hi everyone, so today I was in the kitchen and then you'll never believe what happened come on I have to show you, here's the top counter...". Next. As soon as I hear those kind of intro I skip. On Tiktok I expect the video to show me the content directly (a skateboarder's tiktok would jump straight to the trick, no intro). Yes, there's the impersonal challenge culture where people repeat the same thing... so what, some of them are funny/interesting. It's up to you to skip. After a while I'd say my feed has maybe 5% of junk. And easily skippable.
> With so much good high content available on the internet and how little time people have, it saddens me that so much time is spent on the low quality noise.
No, that's unfair, you are saying all of tiktok content is low quality noise, which is wrong
You don't need to detect it quickly. TikTok lets you explicitly say "Not Interested" on a video, which is really handy if you end up watching too much of it while trying to figure out what the video is about.
I think technologies wise TikTok is similar to that of Youtube Shorts
Both seems to preload about 10 secs of next 4-5 videos.
I think here is the trick: if your recommendation gets sufficiently good, then user won't eagerly scrolling next just to get content they would actually watch, which makes serving less of noticeable problem. There is a feedback loop here.
On TikTok I rarely gets content that would skip at first sight, which speaks to strength of its algorithm.
Don't know about Reddit/Twitter, but Netflix's video is a whole different business overall, all the DRAM and stuff.
I don't use tiktok so forgive me if I'm wrong. But my image of tiktok is that it's basically ~10 second videos. That's basically incomparable to 3-4 minute videos.
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