I've also found that TikTok does a good job of throwing in unexpected videos to test the waters of what the user is interested in. This diversity is one of my favorite things about it.
TikTok on the other hand will sometimes show me a video with almost no views, that is completely random, and I actually do like it. I feel like YouTube has gotten slightly stale in that it tries so hard to show me either viral videos or videos it deems to be of my interests, that the content becomes repetitive. In recent months it's become better at it, but still plays it safe with recommendations.
the answer is always whatever port your at on crew change day.
- show me things that have < 20 views
- reduce the weight of popular channels
- don't send me into a political content feedback loop
- prefer to show me short videos
- show me something wildly outside my tastes every now and then
I just got the Youtube Music app and it had very crude music recommendation options. You have to pick from a pre-selected list of artists. If you click on an artist, it adds another row of tangentially-related artists, but only sometimes.
Suppose you like electronic music, but only niche electronic music. Basically you have to click on Daft Punk, and hope it gives you something closer to what you like, leap-frogging towards e.g. Actress.
It doesn't even let you just type in what you like.., music that you know is already available on Youtube. If I had to guess, that's probably because of stupid copyright shit, but if that's the case, then why can I listen to the probably-violating-the-TOS music in the app if I just search for it myself?? Makes no sense...
Spotify sidesteps some of this by just giving you a bunch of different algorithms feeding different playlists, so at least there are options, but I miss having settings to tweak to gain more control, or to point it in the right direction better.
Given Tik Tok's success, this appears to be a correct assumption.
For every 1 engineer who wants ten different knobs to use the app like a power user, there are 100 or more regular users who don't want anywhere near that much complexity.
Catering to the power users only makes sense if they're your core market. For most public-facing apps, especially free apps, creating and maintaining power user level controls is far more trouble than it's worth.
That's an improved default that fits well for their app. But infinite scroll is not the only use case in the world.
This assumption that "what works for [one app] is the path I should follow because that app has been successful" is frustrating and shortsighted.
This isn't happening on social media (except one notable place: interfaces for advertisers), because users there are to be turned into addicts and exploited. With such a design goal, it's reasonable you want to take away user's agency - you want them "engaged" in your "experience", and them having options detracts from that.
I'm serious, by the way, this is not just a "FB/IG/YouTube/TikTok are evil" rant. Their whole design is created around hooking users up. If you wanted to design an efficient, ergonomic app for sharing media content with friends or an audience, these social media platforms are almost the opposite of what you want.