
TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works - theBashShell
https://www.axios.com/inside-tiktoks-killer-algorithm-52454fb2-6bab-405d-a407-31954ac1cf16.html
======
jakear
It's a (seemingly) pretty simple matter of keeping track of how long someone
looks at a video, and optimizing to show them videos they'll spend a long time
looking at. It's pretty powerful too, I spend much more time looking at TikTok
than any other digital content aggregator (to the extent I had to delete it
from my phone).

They also do some things like sprinkle in random fresh videos, potentially
unrelated to your interests, to your "For You" to get exposure to them and a
base idea of how long people look at them, which is nice because it
potentially boosts small creators to larger audiences.

Further, I'm pretty sure they see what creators are keeping the most people on
their platform for the longest, and directly compensate them. This gives rise
to a host of "lifestyle accounts" where folks can live doing the things that
some chunk of the userbase wants to be doing, and they'll get paid directly
from TikTok, rather than needing to source a third party company to sponsor
them.

All in all, I think it's fantastically designed -- to the extent I'm not sure
it should exist at all.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
I actually think it's got much more to do with the training data.

Given that you are watching a video, you need to either swipe away from it, or
finish watching it. This provides either a 1 or 0 for the video classification
model.

The important contrast here is with FB/IG feed where you can scroll aimlessly
without engaging, leaving you with perhaps 1 engagement out of 10 (or
whatever).

The attached doc suggests that they are only using unsupervised learning,
which I find very hard to believe, to be honest.

~~~
benreesman
Dwell is a _very_ powerful ranking signal in a binary classifier.

Pairwise association of videos watched by the same user consecutively or even
just sampled pairs from their last N videos will get you a video embedding.

Pairwise sampling of users who watch the same video to the end will get you a
user embedding.

Turking category tags will prime the pump for other types of embeddings.

These things can be ensembles, stacked, force learned jointly, etc.

All of this comes out of the box in Keras (though it’s up to you to feed the
data in fast when you’ve got a lot office).

You can argue that getting latent representations/factorizations without
explicit “user clicked show me more” is semi-supervised I guess, but if so all
the recommender stuff since the Netflix Challenge meets that criteria to one
degree or another.

~~~
londons_explore
What surprises me is all of what you've said is the way pretty much _all_
recommenders work - YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. will all be doing this.

Yet people don't spend hours per day browsing tweets.

What is it about tiktok which is so much more effective?

~~~
SergeAx
Facebook and Twitter are social-graph subscription-based services. TikTok just
gives recomendations without subscriptions while knowing nothing about my
social graph.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Well, except for follows, right?

But yeah, it appears (from TikTok's success) that the social graph may not be
particularly useful for content-based recommendation (which really, we should
probably have realised given the existence of Google).

------
Reedx
TikTok is like a highly compressed version of YouTube.

YouTube incentivizes creators to make artificially long videos, resulting in a
huge amount of filler. So you get a lot of videos where you can skip the first
20%+ and not miss anything. The content is buried and spread out.

1 minute of content surrounded by 9 minutes of filler.

TikTok removed those 9 minutes, so it feels very refreshing in that respect.
There's no incentive to create filler - just the opposite.

Of course the downside is that there's only so much you can fit into a 60
second package, so you're not going to get a deep dive into anything. But for
the kind of content that can be compressed like that, TikTok wins big time.

~~~
jrockway
I watch a lot of YouTube and haven't really noticed any artificially long
videos in my bubble of channels. I agree that intros are annoying (I have no
idea why people do them), but other than that... it's just the usual video
stuff. The nature of the format is that a one page blog post becomes a 10
minute video. People talk slower than they read, so it's somewhat unavoidable.
There are also YouTubers that are really into the long form video essay format
(hello, ContraPoints), but I don't think they're doing that to milk as much ad
revenue as possible.

But again, that is just the random subset of YouTube that I watch. I doubt any
of it is that popular, and I am always shocked when I get logged out and am on
the default main page. So my experience could be totally off-base.

~~~
erklik
Really? I feel like I could easily most of the videos I watch and still
understand what the video is about.

The first few minutes are the intro, a message that the video is sponsored and
we will find out about them later, last 3/4 minutes is always the "Like,
Subscribe" and a sponsorship message usually. This means that both the front-
and the back can be cut out easily without any affect on the actual content.

~~~
allenu
I agree. I’m slowly starting to realize that a lot of videos are filler
myself. Because there are so many videos out there and I find they are often
too long, I just skip skip skip ahead until they get to the point. That or
just drop out of the video to find another one that does get to the point.

------
ChefboyOG
I don't see any details about its algorithm, just that they use a
recommendation engine? Things like this aren't proprietary info, they're just
how recommendation engines work:

"Once TikTok collects enough data about the user, the app is able to map a
user's preferences in relation to similar users and group them into
"clusters." Simultaneously, it also groups videos into "clusters" based on
similar themes, like "basketball" or "bunnies.""

Although I do wonder, and maybe someone else with more experience could shed
some light here, whether or not it is likely that TikTok has some
fundamentally super advanced algorithm, or if they just do a better job of
collecting data/training & evaluating their models?

~~~
xnx
More data beats smarter algorithms any day, and TikTok gets a lot of data
because its videos are so short and interaction rate so high. There are tons
of signals it can use as inputs: How much of a video did you let play before
swiping next? How many times did you let the video loop? Did you like? Did you
comment? Did you like a comment? Did you click through to the profile? Did you
view other videos from the profile?

~~~
ramraj07
I don't buy this argument. YouTube ostensibly has a metric ton of information
like this and even if tiktok has more training data now, I'm fairly sure their
training data in principle was smaller than what YouTube historically had
given their decades long presence and their ubiquity in the internet.

This is on top of the documented effort by YouTube to perfect their
recommendation algorithm using the best ML minds they got [1] only to
polarizing response from its users.

Clearly tiktok has other advantages (homogeneity in some content
characteristics, viz. Extremely short videos which probably correlates to
their simplicity) and has clearly tuned a fundamentally better recommendation
algorithm that even the minds at Google brain couldn't figure out.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-
google-b...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-brain-
algorithm-video-recommendation-personalized-feed)

~~~
robjan
YouTube has the problem that all Google products have: they put you in a
filter bubble which you can never get out of. The algorithm also optimises for
more "long form" content and it's pretty well known that the optimum video
length is around 10 mins.

~~~
jassany
if you simply erase you watch history that will reset your recommendations,
always works.

------
rootsudo
Heh,

"We're a 2-year-old company operating with the expectations of a 10-year-old
company," said Michael Beckerman, TikTok's vice president in charge of U.S.
public policy. "We didn't have the opportunity to grow up in the golden years
of the internet, when tech companies could do no wrong. We grew up in the
techlash age ,where there's a lot of skepticism of platforms, how they
moderate content and how their algorithms work.""

Well, yes, Compete or die. It's the same as a tobacco company start up.

Oh, wait, that's Juul.

What happened to them?

~~~
prionassembly
I think there's a part in your comment that you thought but somehow neglected
to type out. It reads to me like two completely disconnected parts.

~~~
rootsudo
I meant by copy/pasting that quote that TikTok's excuse of "we're just 2yrs
old" is not applicable because the Tech world is entering an era of
regulation, which put TikTok on the front page of whom to target first, same
as any other business that enters the marketplace. Using Juul as a reference
to the regulation that they have to abide by (now) and how they innovated to
become known/verb.

Though, you can very much argue that Juul is both Tech & Tobacco. But, imagine
the same statement from Juul.

------
zwieback
Not much of a reveal.

What I find strange about TikTok are the waves of themes I get to see. Being a
50-something I'm probably not the target audience but at first all I saw was
shuffle dance (enjoyed that) followed by Indian and Chinese manufacturing
videos (loved those) and now it's all cats (okay with that).

My daughters explained "Elite TikTok" and "Beans TikTok" so now I realize
there's a whole world built on top of gaming the algorithm in order to bolster
your insider status.

~~~
vii
The recommendation algorithm generally tries to avoid showing directly similar
content. It's surprising it is all cats especially if you ever swipe. Perhaps
this is an A-B test and you are in a group with lower boredom avoidance
settings :)

Can you explain a bit more about Elite TikTok? I found this article but it
contains quite a jumble of ideas
[https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/22/what-is-
elit...](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/22/what-is-elite-alt-
tiktok-and-what-has-it-got-to-do-with-donald-trump)

~~~
zwieback
These articles explain it a bit better but what it boils down to is that a
group of kids create strange content around a theme (beans, frogs, etc.) and
then try to go viral within their peer group, e.g. other kids that are too
cool to like what everyone else likes. Impersonating real brands is also a big
part of it.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/style/elite-
tiktok.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/style/elite-tiktok.html)

[https://www.distractify.com/p/elite-tiktok-
meaning](https://www.distractify.com/p/elite-tiktok-meaning)

------
danmg
How TikTok's "algorithm" works is pretty obvious if you've spent any time on
there.

It learns what you like by how much of a video you watch and how you interact
with it, and it establishes some kind of weighted feature vector based on
hashtags used in the description, words used in the comments, text drawn on
the video, audio background, possibly some audio transcription of words said,
if you commented on it, if you forwarded it to a friend, and so on. There may
be some network based recommendations, based on who you follow but those seem
to be weighted very weakly, and that makes sense if you're trying to keep the
platform from getting botted.

It also seems to do some non-dominant sorting to keep from only showing you
things from the same type of video.

Facebook's competing short video service is terrible in comparison. It only
wants to show me Trevor Noah clips, and things tangentially related to things
I may have "Liked" 12 years ago.

------
lbacaj
I think a huge reason, I didn’t see in the article, that TikTok is able to
train their ML to be far more effective than any other video platform out
there has to do with the size of those clips and how easy it is to flip
through them.

If we are watching 30 second clips, flipping through them quickly, that’s 2
signals a minute and 20 signals every 10 minutes (the average size of a
YouTube video) and that is assuming we watched 20 videos, we might have
flipped through 60 in 10 minutes.

That’s 60 signals where YouTube would’ve gotten 1 signal. Whose ML will be
better trained with your preferences? Obviously TikTok, I don’t think there is
anything special about their algorithms it’s just a function of their product
and the type of content.

------
blackrock
It’s rather comical, how for the past 20 years, Americans have been claiming
themselves to be the pinnacle of creativity and innovation. And at the same
time, denouncing the Chinese as a bunch of copycats-but-can-never-innovate.
And they said the same thing about the Japanese a generation earlier.

Even Carly Fiorina, the witch CEO that burned down HP, said that the Chinese
cannot innovate. [1]

And here you have a prime example of a Chinese company that found a good usage
of the recommendation AI technique, and applied it in an innovative way, and
created a whole new platform, that works better than YouTube or Twitter or
Facebook.

And what happens? The white Americans steal it. Oh I’m sorry, their president
declared it into law, like a dictator does, and force Tiktok to sell itself at
firesale prices.

And what of all the supporters here on HN that have claimed that the Chinese
can’t innovate. Well, their obvious answer is that Tiktok is obviously a
spyware app for the Chinese government.

The American way to steal, is to force a firesale by edict, and get the
patents for it. Then claim that it is their own.

The United States also did this to Toshiba and other Japanese semiconductor
companies in the 1980s. Same dirty trick, different generation.

LOL. The hypocrisy of Americans.

But of course, you are free to prove me wrong.

Also, I expect to get flagged and downvoted for this comment.

[1] [https://time.com/3897081/carly-fiorina-china-
innovation/](https://time.com/3897081/carly-fiorina-china-innovation/)

~~~
0xy
Huawei had a systematic campaign to steal American IP while offering direct
cash incentives to employees who stole it.

------
jbverschoor
I never really understood why TikTok is such a threat

Except for maybe collecting too much data, but that’s any app, and luckily
Apple is taking their measurements for certain things

~~~
erklik
Its the first tech social app i.e. Facebook, MySpace and the like from China,
a country that is not America. That is all there is to it. America realizes
that China is catching up, and considering there are a billion Chinese, it is
inevitable that China will be a foremost power that either competes with or
simply overtakes America.

The current foremost power, America, doesn't like that.

At the very least, this whole thing has made clear that principles that
America repeatedly espouses are forgotten quite quickly when it wants to
retain power.

~~~
0xy
Why should principles be given to countries that do not reciprocate? All major
American tech companies are banished from China, and the only ones left are
ones who agreed to transfer IP to be stolen by the CCP.

~~~
sudosysgen
The US never had any such principles. Whenever any country competes with
American cash-cows, the US "discovers" a reason to ban them. TikTok is not the
first one, see what happened with Bombardier for an example closer to home.

Or, when Canada was threatening the US superiority in engine tech, after which
the US government threatened to embargo Canada from avionics if they proceeded
with the Arrow program. They do the same with the Swedish Gripen, they put an
embargo on their avionics if Sweden sells them to a country which is also
considering the F-35.

American tech compamies are banned from China unless they store data on
Chinese servers and comply with Chinese law; there is no need to transfer IP.
Do you think Google would have transfered Search IP under Project Dragonfly?
Do you think Facebook has given their Ad IP?. Why wouldn't the US use the same
standard of requiring full compliance with US law as enforced by a liaison and
data being on US soil?

Because the question isn't of reciprocity, it is of dominance. That's why
TikTok was banned under the Joker of "National Security", not under any other
standard. The US is simply scared of losing it's advantage in tech to China.
Which of course will likely happen anyways.

In any case, the average person isn't harmed by TikTok anymore and indeed less
so than Facebook.

~~~
0xy
>there is no need to transfer IP

Provably false. [1]

>comply with Chinese law

Chinese law requires companies to hand over root access and data, and also
effectively forbids E2E encryption. This is IP transfer. [2]

>The US is simply scared of losing it's advantage in tech to China

The US has several tech companies with market caps more than double Tik Tok.

>National Security

There's evidence Tik Tok has been promoting CCP propaganda. [3]

>the average person isn't harmed by TikTok anymore and indeed less so than
Facebook

Depends if you trust your data with the same government who regularly
disappears journalists, I guess.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/forced-tech-transfers-are-on-
th...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/forced-tech-transfers-are-on-the-rise-in-
china-european-firms-say-11558344240)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Security_Law)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOlu624glKw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOlu624glKw)

~~~
sudosysgen
>Chinese law requires companies to hand over root access and data, and also
effectively forbids E2E encryption. This is IP transfer. [2]

By that standard the US also requires IP transfer. Have you already forgotten
about PRISM?

>The US has several tech companies with market caps more than double Tik Tok.

Sure, but if China continues in this trajectory then it won't be for long

>Depends if you trust your data with the same government who regularly
disappears journalists, I guess.

Depends if you trust your data with the same government who regularly
fabricates evidence as an excuse to go and kill a million or so people every
once in a while. Or the one that regularly assassinates or threatens to
assassinate activists, I guess. The chance of your own government killing you
is at least four or five orders of magnitude higher than that of China killing
you, same for most other metrics of harm. Can't say the same if you're a
foreigner with the US government, though! That being said, US control of the
press is much more sophisticated, so there is really no need to kill any
American journalists except in exceptional cases. But don't delude yourself,
if it ever came to that there would be no hesitation - look at what the USG
did to Fred Hampton of Gary Webb, or what they tried to do with Martin Luther
King.

>There's evidence Tik Tok has been promoting CCP propaganda. [3]

There's a difference between people on TikTok defending China and TikTok
conspiring to push Chinese propaganda. There is evidence for the first one,
and absolutely no evidence of the latter. There's people who defend China and
push propaganda on Facebook and Instagram too, if you go looking for them. And
there's also American propaganda on TikTok.

------
hamolton
What's been funny is how there's been so many trends that relate to exploiting
the engagement stats. For a long time, there were a lot of videos begging for
likes or claiming that the heart would be purple on the particular video; this
seemed to lead to a de-emphasis of likes. There's a lot of videos/sounds that
involve a long build up leading to a short reveal, making sure the viewer
finishes the video. One-frame image reveals encourage downloads and replays,
and content hidden behind the interface can often lead to many downloads.
Videos explaining how to repeatedly hit the share link button will sometimes
have more shares than views. There's endless numbers of alternative spellings
of words like sex and porn to avoid the edgy content filters, but I suppose
that's a given. The hashtags are weird to me since #xyzcba seemed to actually
have an effect for a while.

The things I didn't know in this article were the stuff about device type
(what is that used for?) and the initial 8 videos. Perhaps the next trend I'll
see is flexing on having an unlocked, AT&T-branded Samsung G892A.

------
SomaticPirate
Does anyone know of an open source recommendation engine? I would love to just
explore how one works bet it seems like this solely in the realm of
proprietary software at the moment.

I have a dream of naively making a open source recommendation engine using
data from good reads and imdb.

There is a real utility here that I worry will be captured entirely by
companies without an open source alternative.

~~~
YetAnotherNick
Facebook's dlrm is good one. There's libffm, xlearn etc. I found dlrm to be
good choice between extensible and fast.

------
tqi
Devil is in the details, a lot of which seem to have been lost in this
explanation. This seems to be mostly a view into their value model (ie
prioritize P(Click) * value + P(Heart) * value etc), but the hidden issue
arise from the type of content that is likely generate clicks / hearts / long
watch times.

------
chaotic_mind
To be fair, the algorithm they told is mostly what we would have perceived,
knowing if that is Machine Learning driven.

Although, I am quite intrigued what they would be showcasing in their
"transparency centers". If they show what extent their data can be utilized.
and not simply a simulation of the ML stuff.

~~~
TheJoeMan
I think it's interesting how they took the warnings on creating feedback loop
"bubbles" and social media addiction causes and used that as their business
model.

~~~
deckard1
It's the logical result of where we are going as a society.

World of Warcraft may not have started out as a Skinner Box. But they realized
what they had and used it to their advantage. The result is that all games
today are casino-ified. Lootboxes, microtransactions, abstracted currency,
etc. It all comes from Vegas.

TikTok and apps like Robinhood are the bleeding edge of this.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-y...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-year-
old-robinhood-customer-dies-by-suicide-after-seeing-a-730000-negative-
balance/)

Turning the stock market into a slick slot machine with all the same feedback
and nudges. It's sickening, but not surprising.

------
jariel
Can someone please indicate if there is truly some kind of AI magic going on
here?

TT claims it's a 'key magical ingredient' \- and apparently acquisition talks
are held up ostensibly over 'access to training data' etc..

But I find this maybe hard to believe.

TT learning is pretty good, but I suspect an algorithm could do it, or
possibly some basic ML, not necessarily needed Deep Learning.

I suspect the 'Deep Learning' they use may not even be very sophisticated, but
provide cover to radically inflate their ostensible value to CEO acquirers who
just love the concept of 'real AI' often irrespective of it's material value.

I'm just suspicious there isn't really much there, and find it odd that an
entity like Microsoft would be intimidated by trying to do that piece well.

------
novaRom
The main reason for me why YouTube is out of choice is too many Ads
interruptions and absence of Portrait mode video support. Even Telegram
supports Vertical videos - you can zoom into any horizontal video, and I can
move that window so that I can watch full screen on my phone.

------
red_hare
I find that it takes device into account very interesting. What does me using
an iPhone XS vs a Samsung Note vs a generic cheap Android phone say about me?
I wonder if ends up being a proxy for income, age, or gender...

~~~
Jommi
oh its 1000% a proxy for income. No doubt about it.

~~~
erklik
Third world vs First world as well. People in America don't want to see the
content made by folks in rural India.

------
karaterobot
I didn't see anything in there about how their algorithm prevents people from
seeing videos involving poor people[1] or Hong Kong protests[2]. Maybe that's
part of the secret sauce.

[1] [https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-
us...](https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-
discrimination/)

[2]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks-
beijing-roots-fuel-censorship-suspicion-it-builds-huge-us-audience/)

------
Mascobot
Well, this is not really "revealing" anything new on "TikTok algorithms".

This is actually a very simple description of a very basic methodology. Not an
algorithm.

------
andrewla
One more tilt at the old windmill.

This is not an algorithm; this is a heuristic. An algorithm is (loosely) a
method or procedure for achieving some specified end.

"... avoid redundancies that could bore the user, like seeing multiple videos
with the same music or from the same creator" is the goal, and they have
heuristics to try to work towards that, and algorithms and software that
implement those heuristics.

I think the ship has sailed on this, but when you are in circles where both
heuristics and algorithms are in play, this blurring of lines makes for very
confusing conversations.

------
bilater
I mean it's just Collaborative filtering no?

------
blululu
TLDR: We do some math [https://xkcd.com/1838/](https://xkcd.com/1838/) On a
more serious note I think there is a lot of sophistication and that is being
left out from this very simplified explanation. To say something like 'we show
things from other clusters every so often' over looks so many questions about
how far apart the clusters are, and how often these are shown. These values
are foundational to the UX and understanding how to tune them should get a lot
more focus than it does. In the future it would be good for the AI community
and the associated HCI researchers in AIUX to focus on how these settings
change the experience of a ML pipeline.

------
FirstLvR
so... wheres the code?

~~~
oshea64bit
I'm not quite sure how this is even remotely an expectation.

------
jordache
don't see how tiktok is so game changing? How long can one look at random
dance videos? What demographic would maintain sustained interest over years?

flavor of the month/year?

~~~
wombatmobile
How many minutes have you spent watching TikTok?

~~~
jordache
i had an account for a few weeks.. followed a few folks.

However my assessment is a video has much less revisit value than still
images. The nature of a video requires much more time investment. Audience has
to remain focused on a video for a period of time to achieve full reward.
Unlike a still image, where a quick glance can gain satisfaction.

These platforms can not sustain on pure novel content. The model of user
engagement must include revisit of content. You see a thumbnail of a video
you've liked or have seen before. What is the threshold of intrigue, that will
propel you to invest x amnt of time fully dedicated to that video content?

If my opinion above holds true, tiktok will not be a lasting phenomenon. The
content will not keep up.

~~~
Semaphor
> However my assessment is a video has much less revisit value than still
> images.

I would say the same, only for text versus images. and yet for some reason
I'll never understand besides being only in my early 30ies, people prefer
images. and videos even more.

~~~
jordache
text and videos, I group into the same category due to the full consumption of
the content is over a period of time that is much greater than an instant.
Consuming text obviously is a much less passive pattern than video, so they
diverge greatly in that respect.

Images, for the mass consumer audience, require orders of magnitude less time
to fully consume.

The dynamic is very much different.

The Tiktok vs Vine comparison is very apt.. there is hardly any differences
between them in terms of the process of content creation, and how compelling
they are to a mass market audience

------
coldcode
Maybe I am just strange, but I find no appeal in TikTok, and would not like
something that just shows me more of the same things. But I can see how it
might appear to people who just want to be stimulated with stuff.

~~~
Matticus_Rex
I thought this would be the case for me, but after trying it I've been really
impressed with the creativity and content quality. The algorithm quickly
figured out I didn't care about teenagers dancing and started feeding me cool
crafts and comedy, and my faith in Gen Z has grown dramatically.

~~~
xnx
Agreed. TikTok has very good built-in video tools, but the creativity and
sense of storytelling in short form videos on the part of these kids is very
impressive.

------
gazelleeatslion
Does anyone actually trust any of this nonsense?

At this scale, TikTok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.. it should legally
be required to either:

\- Open Source It

\- Provide clear option to opt-out

\- Provide the params to be 100% configurable

Wake up people!

~~~
judge2020
You can opt out of the algorithm by... not using the app, or just not using
the 'for you' page and searching for every video you'd like. But even then,
all of the platforms you list have billions or trillions of posts on their
site, so there would be no way to opt out of algorithmic listing since
something has to decide what posts show up at the top of the list. The only
service I know of that actually allows you to do that is Twitter with
tweetdeck, where searches can show a stream of new posts.

~~~
gazelleeatslion
Fair and not an unreasonable comment. Regardless, I do think there should be a
non-personalized option to at least fallback just as some sort of metric of a
control group.

The ethics behind these black box bubbling users is the dirty dark secret of
tech companies.

I don’t understand why more people are not concerned about it running wild
(especially when kids sit on these apps all day non-stop)

~~~
wombatmobile
What are you concerned about? What is "running wild" and how would you
regulate it?

------
Kednicma
Here's the secret sauce: "Using machine learning, the algorithm serves videos
to users based on their proximity to other clusters of users and content that
they like." It's impressive how they arranged to be transparent for everything
else, but kept this important part opaque.

Rumor is that the actual secret sauce here is human curation; people hand-
select videos with high appeal and label them "viral", "popular", etc. in
order to astroturf eyeballs and clicks. I suppose that admitting this directly
would contrast sharply with the Chinese-harmonious-technocracy veneer that
they work to project.

~~~
simion314
It mentions that it also serves you from time to time a video from a different
cluster and analyzes your reaction so you are not stuck in one cluster without
hope to get out.

~~~
albertshin
feel like dating apps do something similar...

but I wonder why I end up in YouTube holes with bottomless pits though until I
hit the reset button.

~~~
simion314
Probably YT algorithm fall into a local maximum where it detected that X is
enraging enough, then creators notice that the X is popular and they start
putting more X, then the algorithm is putting more weight behind X and you are
now stuck here.

~~~
anticensor
Not because of that, but because YouTube does not have human curators.

~~~
simion314
Can you tell me a case where humans curators would help? IMO YT should put
more humans to answer support issues, like you have an youtuber with 10 years
of experience and a large number of viewers and you just stike him without a
human looking? If the strike/block has a large impact then have a human check.

