21–30 of 58 posts
1. It doesn't even claim to be that.
2. It's over a year old - so even if it was, this is no longer it.
3. There's zero incentive for them to release it, but every incentive to release a fake one.
4. TikTok is too much of a national asset, I doubt the Chinese government would not use it to their advantage (and transparency would be counter to that).
Edit: there's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471278
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 Topi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More data beats better algorithms. TikTok has vastly more interaction data by nature of its design. IG and YouTube shorts don't have nearly the volume of engaged users and are reluctant to disrupt the cash cow of their traditional interfaces.
IG has plenty of data (I did ML at IG). Don't be naive.
I haven't worked on sites as big as YouTube but on sites with 100,000 members who are very much engaged with one "game" you usually find they are mainly indifferent when you offer them another "game" to play.
I like YouTube for what it is. I have interacted very little with shorts but Google has scarily seen into my imagination. I don't want to go into that rabbit hole.
Like Facebook before, everyone talks about the TikTok algorithm being some super secret and valuable mystery. In reality, both Facebook and TikTok succeeded because they were at the right place at the right time and didn't screw things up. The TikTok recommendation system is smart and very well implemented, but nothing novel that couldn't be implemented by a dozen other teams.
Not true. Why do IG reels and YouTube shorts suck, then? They clearly built something superior. And it can't seem to be matched by the biggest tech companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 Topi…
Purely chronological sorting of posts works the best and is fully automated. It's just really bad at keeping users eyeballs on ads.
Like Facebook before, everyone talks about the TikTok algorithm being some super secret and valuable mystery. In reality, both Facebook and TikTok succeeded because they were at the right place at the right time and didn't screw things up. The TikTok recommendation system is smart and very well implemented, but nothing novel that couldn't be implemented by a dozen other teams.
Not true. Why do IG reels and YouTube shorts suck, then? They clearly built something superior. And it can't seem to be matched by the biggest tech companies.
It has nothing to do with the quality of the algorithm. In fact the YT algorithm has gotten worse since they introduced shorts because they shove shorts into people's faces.
A better question would be why is the regular YouTube algorithm so bad. And the answer is because it doesn't optimize at all for the consumers, but for the producers (producers of ads, that is). TT has figured out it doesn't matter what people consume as long as they consume, whereas YT is bullish into controlling what people consume.
Like Facebook before, everyone talks about the TikTok algorithm being some super secret and valuable mystery. In reality, both Facebook and TikTok succeeded because they were at the right place at the right time and didn't screw things up. The TikTok recommendation system is smart and very well implemented, but nothing novel that couldn't be implemented by a dozen other teams.
Not true. Why do IG reels and YouTube shorts suck, then? They clearly built something superior. And it can't seem to be matched by the biggest tech companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My take: it's a mix of brand bundling and lack of data. They're roughly equivalent but shorts is bundled with youtube which has its own brand perception and reels are bundled with IG/FB and have their own brand perception. Additionally fewer users means less algorithmic data to keep viewers. Tiktok was allowed to establish its own brand and develop a community while shorts and reels are intrinsically tied to their pa…
> My take: it's a mix of brand bundling and lack of data. They're roughly equivalent but shorts is bundled with youtube which has its own brand perception and reels are bundled with IG/FB and have their own brand perception. Additionally fewer users means less algorithmic data to keep viewers. My intuition would work the other way around. I'd expect offerings from more established companies to have a big leg up in te…
https://www.threads.net/@mikeynerd/post/DB7DS7LzsVU
TikTok gets a definite thumbs up or thumbs down for every video it shows you whereas if you click on one particular sidebar video YouTube can make no conclusion about how you felt about the other videos in the sidebar. The recommendation literature talks about "negative sampling" to overcome this, I never could really believe in it, I think now it doesn't really work.
I built a system like that and found that, paradoxically, you have to make it blend in a good amount of content that it doesn't think you'd like for it to be able to calibrate itself.
Like Facebook before, everyone talks about the TikTok algorithm being some super secret and valuable mystery. In reality, both Facebook and TikTok succeeded because they were at the right place at the right time and didn't screw things up. The TikTok recommendation system is smart and very well implemented, but nothing novel that couldn't be implemented by a dozen other teams.
Not true. Why do IG reels and YouTube shorts suck, then? They clearly built something superior. And it can't seem to be matched by the biggest tech companies.