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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

"However, after spending maybe one hour at most scrolling and liking/disliking things to tune the algorithm, and search tags, it works fairly well."

Can someone support that from Germany? I suspect that's highly locale-dependent.

I have given TikTok several tries, spent hours searching for interesting stuff and liking things.

I always get generic (and really bad) cooking videos and drunken people doing stupid things.

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Do you mean for content in German? There might just not be enough of it to be anything but low-effort junk - I never got anything useful in German and gave up after about 20 minutes.

I'm based in Germany but view English content and I can at least echo your sentiments about the lack of good content. I've read multiple times about how amazing the TikTok algorithm is meant to be and how quickly it learns about what to show you, and yet that has not been my experience at all.

Twice now I've spent an hour attempting to train the algorithm but it's just endless streams of trash. The worst part for me was coming across an interesting video, for example some industrial machine process, only to be subjected to the exact same video hosted by another user. Most times they have just overlaid some music, but sometimes they crop the original or add some useless text overlays.

The part that also annoyed me was it felt like the algorithm gave up every 20-25 videos and tried to show me something sexual, even though I was not interested. I always found the subject transitions extremely jarring and annoying - I already have my porn channels sorted thank you very much, I'm looking for a different type of wood-working

I don't expect much from German content. ;-)

I meant English language content, but with my phone being in Germany.

Thanks for telling your experience!

make sure you set your languages of choice in the settings of the app.

Fun part is its deduction of locale by looking at your number/sim card. I usually get an eSIM while travelling, and the company seems to be based in Netherlands. Was in Mexico last time, and was getting a constant stream of content from Amsterdam. Took me a while to understand why.

Pretty sure it uses regular geo information as well because we travelled to France and immediately saw a bunch of French tiktok even though the SIM card was Canadian.

It's actually a fun quirk, you visit a country and you get to see their tiktok videos.

Indeed, the best metric is some sort of cpa media buying experience.

I have the following channels:

- twitch, good roi, short lived - affiliate forums, long lived, breakeven roi - youtube, fb, ig, cant ever recover investment, only good for content creation - ad networks and tik tok , totally 0 conversion rate even at what appears to be tremendous amount of traffic.

So yeah, if you arebin my niche a and a million views does not convert, then that algo and the platform are useless.

My comment doesn’t apply if you’re asking about videos for which the language is German. I assume you meant geographically based content regions for English videos.

Just checking that you are using a mobile (android or iOS) version of the app. I may be totally wrong (I’m basically making this up based on intuition), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the internet site version of TikTok doesn’t support the same level of input to the algorithm. There is fine tuning to your interaction data that the mobile app supports (I’m sure that it bases decisions on how long you watch videos (regardless of whether you like or follow), and I think it might even base decisions of what sections of videos make you stop watching)).

I hit it off right away with the mobile version. Off the bat: there were lots of half-nude women, gym rat videos, and other generic social content for my region. Within the hour, I was getting mostly finely curated comedy clips from standup comedians I liked (and not from others I didn’t like). It’s really amazing how well the algorithm works.

I'm an English speaker, who is learning Japanese as a second language. I've found it difficult to get tiktok to recommend japanese-language videos to me - will usually only do so if I follow an account.

I think there is a language switch somewhere high up in their algorithm that is hard to compete against with watch metrics.

Yes, working for me well, too in Germany. First boring content, then frighteningly well adjusted context. As I dislike most German content, it updated itself to mostly showing English/expat stuff. But also some German content that I like.

>I have given TikTok several tries, spent hours

Why would you do that lol? Do you really have FOMO for the next garbage social media dopamine machine that simply wants to hijack your attention to sell ads and get you addicted to zombie scrolling like every other instance before it? Why does it have to work for you? I think you have your answer at this point.

It's just another garbage lowest common denominator mass content farm and memes. It doesn't have to be nor isn't something more profound than that, and in fact with it's short content length and more sophisticated AI it's just like everything before but worse.

You can certainly just dismiss it and occupy your limited time doing something else more productive or fulfilling.

If you need to know: last time I was stuck in a regional train with several hours still to go.

Stop patronizing me.

FWIW, I've tried doing the same thing with Twitter. People hold that site in the highest regards, and whenever I read/post I'm always having the most miserable time. The longer I spent, the less sense it made to me and eventually I had to just leave it alone once and for all. I get where they're coming from when they want to enjoy something but don't know where to start

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