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OP here. My guess is the vast majority of TikTok users don't realize how much control they have over its contents, and thus they end up watching mostly attention-grabbing fluff. I think even they will stumble on good meaningful stuff, but it won't be that often. But yes, I've find with effort it's a great resource. The best one for short-form videos that I know of.

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I agree. I found that the process of training TikTok requires self-disciple and self-control and it was not easy in the beginning. I just marvel that the TikTok actually responded to this, unlike other solutions that basically don't care about your feedback. I wonder why that is? I feel that there is a huge manual override in the Google/Netflix/Amazon algorithms. In TikTok, I feel like I am having a relationship with Artificial Intelligence. It feels dangerous. If you lose control, it will eat you up alive and waste tremendous amount of your time. But if you can control it, it will deliver value.

How do you break into the good content? Where do you get the first seeds? I can't ad weight to interesting videos if no interesting video is suggested.

For me it happened randomly, but I think you can start searching for good content through good keywords or good people that you already know. This will create first good seeds and then the system will proceed with random improvements and through feedback loop.

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