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.
I think one of the biggest things TikTok does is that it shows completely random videos from time to time. I often get videos with 0 views that were just randomly shown to me. So the platform actually has some randomness that can spontaneously find something interesting instead of having people build up a base first.
Maybe it's me but tiktok content is boring to me. Videos too short to care. Finding videos by your keyword is difficult. The camera angles are too zoomed and the thin width and increased height creates ugly looking videos. The videos themselves are people picking an action or movement and isolating it for effect.
I wonder how many others haven't been bite by the tiktok bug.
Well, that's just you. After some time TikTok actually learns what type of videos you like to watch and shows you more and more of those. You end up in a bubble. Their algorithm is pretty good at that.
When I check the phones of my kids or my wife, I can see totally different type of videos recommended to them.
I saw so much promotion of the tiktok algorithm on HN so I decided to check it out. For the first hour I was laughing at almost every video. The app very quickly optimized to show me funny videos from people like me. And then after a few times using the app, I quickly became bored. I don't want to see endless funny videos, I want to watch some longer informative videos and I couldn't see how to make the app do that.
When I go on youtube it shows me 10-20 minute science and engineering videos which I can put on and sit on the couch watching. This provides lasting value for me because I never get bored of these like I do with 20 second comedy videos.
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.
Being a TikTok user for a few months I don't know if it is that remarkable. It sees what you like and on which type of videos you spend more time on and then it spams you that type of video until you are bored of it.
The most praised thing in TikTok is how they tailor videos to each user. While Insta or Facebook rely on virality, TikTok is able to show you videos barely liked and shared, and you somehow like them.
I remember reading about a guy experimenting with liking only long and high quality videos, skipping short and cheap ones. After a dozen of visualizations TikTok got the cues and started showing exactly what the guy had planned.
After five years in LinkedIn saying the plain truth, they still don't get me at all, and they just keep my feed filled with the most "interacted" content.
What's special about tiktoks algo is timing IMO. The general segmentation/profiling probably isn't as special as people suggest.
Like all social apps, the engagement is key. TikTok already has a simple UX, and there is zero burden for users to watch videos, vs figure out what tweet you want to write, or click through a bunch of pages on any other social app.
One swipe every however many seconds to 3min (used to be one min) is all you need for instant reward ... video plays.
TikTok needs to schedule some series of videos in advance,which includes video timing. Im sure videos themselves are a key part as well... videos where users lost interest within 3 seconds are probably ghosted.
TikTok has to keep all of this in mind along with the user profile. From there the user is being navigated by the algo which is trying to keep only one thing true -- keep the user engaged and measure the risk of a user leaving, when a user seems to be on the path of exiting the app, thats when you notice the algo throwing more random content out.
TBH ... Im not sure if TikTok cares about the information propagated. Its such a mix of culture, politics, whatever, and its all generally crowdsourced. A lot less innocent that Twitter.
What makes tiktok different is not the algorithm, but the data that the algorithm has to work with. Do you like a tweet? Hard to judge from your behaviour, unless you explicitly hit like. With video, it's easy: Do you keep watching? Youtube's algorithm works great for the same reason. (The article does point out one important difference between youtube and tiktok: On youtube, you have to click on a video first. Meaning, the algorithm has to suggest not just videos you would enjoy, but also videos that you would decide to click on.)
I tried out TikTok for a few nights. It very, very quickly got repetitive. I think the short-form content sphere can only fit so much of an arc in what little time it has. And getting people to sit through it requires being a bit click-baity. And everything was obviously staged, and a lot of times it seemed like...
Okay, so when I was a kid, we made stupid videos too. But we never expected anyone to watch them. And they were often 5-10 minutes long in the end.
On TikTok you can tell that the priority of being filmed is to be seen. They aren't just having fun. It's like TV, and weirds me out.
The video algorithm is a lot more precise. If you spend ~3 seconds on 2 girl scout videos before swiping on, and less than 1 second on body building, you suddenly get a surge of girl scout videos like the whole app is sponsored by them. Someone else never noticed a single video in the subject. It feels magical that the app happens to have thousands of videos for your specific likes and none for content you don't like. I wouldn't be surprised if it went down to measuring your attention to a hundredth of a second
Saying all that, if you read 1000 characters, according to the TikTok way of sorting, you're already hooked. There will be plenty of posts where you swipe on after ~10 characters (in terms of swiping on within X hundreds of a second)
People who regularly use TikTok are used to the swipe up super quickly once a post doesnt interest you, it shouldn't be any different for measuring text
TikTok is about short videos. Youtube is about longer videos. People expect short videos and are looking for short videos so they'll put up with random videos. On Youtube I look for 10-30 minute videos on specific topics, not just random funny videos.
To put it another way, TikTok is Ice Creme, Youtube is dinner. A popular Ice cream stand has a lot more throughput than most restaurants. It only takes ~1 minute to serve a customer some ice cream.
Technically, TikTok is better at loading video than any other app I’ve used. Seeing a loading state on a video is so rare it makes me think something is wrong when I see it. And its recommendation engine (for you page) blows everyone else out of the water.
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.
These are neat, but in my mind, TikTok is far more about the ForYou algorithm than the fact that it's a scrolling feed of videos. The latter is fairly easy to do, as showcased by this very thread. Any decent engineer can throw together a demo like this fairly easily. TikTok's huge success though seems to be due to how good it is at predicting what people will like, which is something that even Youtube struggles to sometimes. Of course predicting 10s videos is much easier than predicting 5m videos.
TikTok (or at least my experience with it) is largely focused on 15-second clips, so I'm not sure duration differences are the significant ones. It seems the algorithm's ability to surface engaging content on a per-user basis is more important than anything else.
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.
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