TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works • Hacker News Board

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#31

Post by hombre_fatal » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #6

Maybe I am just strange, but I find no appeal in TikTok, and would not like something that just shows me more of the same things. But I can see how it might appear to people who just want to be stimulated with stuff.

TikTok's homepage is like trying to figure out what Youtube is by scrolling through Youtube's trending tab. If you didn't know better, you'd think "well, I'm never checking out Youtube again, what the hell was that?"

I thought it was just preteens dancing until I realized my girlfriend uses it for some sort of daily exercise routine, food prep / cooking, and even some sort of podcast-like thing where a conversation is broken up into a bunch of autoplaying short videos.

I still couldn't be bothered to figure it out and use it (though I feel like I should as a self-respecting technologist and app developer who should know what the good people like), but there seems to be more there than the first impression reveals.

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#32

Post by ramimac » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

jakear wrote: post #21

xnx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's so much good meta-data (likes, comments, duration, sound used, views, like/view ratio, skips, loops, subscribes, etc.) that I'd be surprised if they were digging into the contents of the video at all right now.

They could also be digging only into audio, doing speech recognition on it, then clustering the text. Augment that with the text users have put into the video directly using the in-app editor and you have some pretty solid data.

If that were true, it'd be interesting to see if they push out support for close-captioning. It's an accessibility push, but also would leverage a lot of the same capabilities...

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#33

Post by judge2020 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

gazelleeatslion wrote: post #19

Does anyone actually trust any of this nonsense? At this scale, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.. it should legally be required to either: - Open Source It - Provide clear option to opt-out - Provide the params to be 100% configurable Wake up people!

You can opt out of the algorithm by... not using the app, or just not using the 'for you' page and searching for every video you'd like. But even then, all of the platforms you list have billions or trillions of posts on their site, so there would be no way to opt out of algorithmic listing since something has to decide what posts show up at the top of the list. The only service I know of that actually allows you to do that is Twitter with tweetdeck, where searches can show a stream of new posts.

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#34

Post by tucif » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

gazelleeatslion wrote: post #19

Does anyone actually trust any of this nonsense? At this scale, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.. it should legally be required to either: - Open Source It - Provide clear option to opt-out - Provide the params to be 100% configurable Wake up people!

If services were compelled to opensource at some growth point, would you have them be compelled to ensure their codebase is readable?

I’m just imagining that scenario and companies choosing to “opensource” their obfuscated/assembly code.

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#35

Post by zwieback » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

Not much of a reveal.

What I find strange about TikTok are the waves of themes I get to see. Being a 50-something I'm probably not the target audience but at first all I saw was shuffle dance (enjoyed that) followed by Indian and Chinese manufacturing videos (loved those) and now it's all cats (okay with that).

My daughters explained "Elite TikTok" and "Beans TikTok" so now I realize there's a whole world built on top of gaming the algorithm in order to bolster your insider status.

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#36

Post by jordache » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

don't see how tiktok is so game changing? How long can one look at random dance videos? What demographic would maintain sustained interest over years?

flavor of the month/year?

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#37

Post by slykar » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

gazelleeatslion wrote: post #19

Does anyone actually trust any of this nonsense? At this scale, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.. it should legally be required to either: - Open Source It - Provide clear option to opt-out - Provide the params to be 100% configurable Wake up people!

> Provide clear option to opt-out

I would say there's a very good option to opt-out of TikTok - don't use it.

Facebook is much harder to opt-out, as they can track you even if you don't have an account.

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#38

Post by DanBC » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

jordache wrote: post #36

don't see how tiktok is so game changing? How long can one look at random dance videos? What demographic would maintain sustained interest over years? flavor of the month/year?

> random dance videos?

There's so much more to Tiktok than random dance videos.

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#39

Post by gazelleeatslion » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #33

gazelleeatslion wrote: post #19

Does anyone actually trust any of this nonsense? At this scale, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.. it should legally be required to either: - Open Source It - Provide clear option to opt-out - Provide the params to be 100% configurable Wake up people!

You can opt out of the algorithm by... not using the app, or just not using the 'for you' page and searching for every video you'd like. But even then, all of the platforms you list have billions or trillions of posts on their site, so there would be no way to opt out of algorithmic listing since something has to decide what posts show up at the top of the list. The only service I know of that actually allows you to…

Fair and not an unreasonable comment. Regardless, I do think there should be a non-personalized option to at least fallback just as some sort of metric of a control group.

The ethics behind these black box bubbling users is the dirty dark secret of tech companies.

I don’t understand why more people are not concerned about it running wild (especially when kids sit on these apps all day non-stop)

Re: TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works

#40

Post by dannyw » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #18

gcmac wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say it’s more likely they have super advanced/clever ways of doing the latter. The algorithm could be a simple dot product and the result could be great or terrible depending on how good the feature extraction is. Pulling useful features out of videos is no small task. The fact that everyone raves about how good the recommendations are indicates to me that this is where their innovation lies.

There's so much good meta-data (likes, comments, duration, sound used, views, like/view ratio, skips, loops, subscribes, etc.) that I'd be surprised if they were digging into the contents of the video at all right now.

Bytedance has thousands of the smartest data scientists in China.