ByteDance's Recommendation System
github.com
ByteDance's Recommendation System
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#2Past discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35573624
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#3Context: ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok. Frequently people talk about "the tiktok algorithm". This is that.
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#4Past discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35573624
The article linked in that post is dead (403). Here is a cached version:
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#5Context: ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok. Frequently people talk about "the tiktok algorithm". This is that.
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.
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#6Context: ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok. Frequently people talk about "the tiktok algorithm". This is that.
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 Topics, etc. The conservative right often labels such curation as liberal propaganda.
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#7Like 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.
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#8Context: ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok. Frequently people talk about "the tiktok algorithm". This is that.
While this is from ByteDance, who also are behind TikTok, this algorithm is likely not the one behind TikTok.
Instead, it is likely a component that powers ByteDance's commercial recommender system solution, which they market to e-commerce companies: https://www.byteplus.com/en/product/recommend
This was mentioned in past discussions of the paper on HN.
And even if aspects of this are used for TikTok: (a) it would be just one of many components of their recommendation system, and (b) the TikTok recommendation system has changed a lot during the 2+ years since this has been published.
So take what you see here with a grain of salt. After reading the paper and the code, you will NOT know how TikTok's recommendations work.
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#9Like 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.
Re: ByteDance's Recommendation System
#10Context: ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok. Frequently people talk about "the tiktok algorithm". This is that.
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.
> They have people putting their fingers on the scales to decide what content gets promoted.
Is this just your belief or is there evidence you can point to.
How would you differentiate manual intervention from algorithmic intervention?