Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

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I really don’t get what is this panic about TikTok. When I used it for the first time, it just kept throwing soft porn videos. I see how people would get “addicted” but I don’t see it becoming any more mainstream than many similar websites. It’s recommendation system left a lot to desire as it simply ignored my preferences and kept throwing at me more of juvenile videos.

So far Social media has strived to be just consumption platform, not utility. Social media can drive every day activities from dating to finding jobs to finding summer camps to garage sale to purchasing gifts etc. There is a lot of untapped potential that FB unfortunately didn’t managed to build upon. The problem with consumption platforms is that they will fall out of fashion eventually. It is astonishing that large swaths of humanity suddenly don’t find FB newsfeed interesting any more. It almost happened to so many people and just over span of months. To me it looks like more of biological saturation rather than anything else.

This website is the only place I find people who say that the TikTok algorithm somehow doesn't work. If that's the case, why is everyone so addicted to it? Talk to any other person and their feed is completely unique from any other person. If you're into comedy, you get comedy videos. If you're into educational stuff, you get that. If you're into sexy girls dancing, you get that.

Admittedly the last one seems to be the default (I assume like in most cases, the most popular stuff of all is softcore porn, and therefore it'll default to showing that), but if you scroll past the sexy girls dancing instead of sitting through the whole video, it'll learn you're not interested. So I can only surmise if you kept getting them it's because you're watching them. I don't think TikTok has a feature to detect HN users and turn the algorithm off just for them for some reason.

it simply ignored my preferences and kept throwing at me more of juvenile videos.

I did not have a similar experience at all. I’d be a little concerned if I had.

As others have said I think most people’s experience is that TikTok is absolutely phenomenal at discerning what people want to watch - even if they are not aware of their preference themselves.

It's better than what Instagram does, and way better than what Twitter does, but it may also be a sign of the biases and politics engineered into algorithms in Instagram and Twitter.

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