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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 to…
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.
> would not like something that just shows me more of the same things Me neither. Good thing TikTok provides variety and helps users discover new things. > But I can see how it might appear to people who just want to be stimulated with stuff. Don't we all? Is that not why we're on Hacker News, to find stimulation targeted more specifically to us than other websites?
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It mentions that it also serves you from time to time a video from a different cluster and analyzes your reaction so you are not stuck in one cluster without hope to get out.
feel like dating apps do something similar... but I wonder why I end up in YouTube holes with bottomless pits though until I hit the reset button.
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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.
Why would you be surprised to learn TikTok is doing video content analysis?
It's a (seemingly) pretty simple matter of keeping track of how long someone looks at a video, and optimizing to show them videos they'll spend a long time looking at. It's pretty powerful too, I spend much more time looking at TikTok than any other digital content aggregator (to the extent I had to delete it from my phone). They also do some things like sprinkle in random fresh videos, potentially unrelated to your…
Given that you are watching a video, you need to either swipe away from it, or finish watching it. This provides either a 1 or 0 for the video classification model.
The important contrast here is with FB/IG feed where you can scroll aimlessly without engaging, leaving you with perhaps 1 engagement out of 10 (or whatever).
The attached doc suggests that they are only using unsupervised learning, which I find very hard to believe, to be honest.
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?
I don't see any details about its algorithm, just that they use a recommendation engine? Things like this aren't proprietary info, they're just how recommendation engines work: "Once TikTok collects enough data about the user, the app is able to map a user's preferences in relation to similar users and group them into "clusters." Simultaneously, it also groups videos into "clusters" based on similar themes, like "bas…
Here's the secret sauce: "Using machine learning, the algorithm serves videos to users based on their proximity to other clusters of users and content that they like." It's impressive how they arranged to be transparent for everything else, but kept this important part opaque. Rumor is that the actual secret sauce here is human curation; people hand-select videos with high appeal and label them "viral", "popular", et…
if that rumor holds any water, that would be an impressive team of curators who have a pretty extraordinary ability to spot* globally favorable trends. I remember reading when FB tried to employ human curators for their news section, bias creeped in and was scrapped away. wonder what TikTok did differently. * although with popularity of TikTok, one needs to wonder if that team have become THE trendsetters themselves.…
They had teams of editors for Trending. Then, in 2016, conservatives complained that there was a liberal bias (which I don't really think there was, except obvious lies were filtered out). The editors were then removed, with the result that Pope Francis endorsed Trump a few days before the 2016 election.
Funny how things work out, I guess.
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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)
so... wheres the code?