I ran my own ghetto experiment. Despite resisting (I'm still not going to install it on mobile), it was Plebbit that brought me to Tiktok. Without having visited Tiktok, I've seen thousands of tiktoks that were scraped out and hosted on other platforms. Over the course of the year, I collected well over a hundred videos.
I went back to the source for each of these and started Liking them. I'd check every so often to see if the "For You" feed improved. It did improve, considerably, but it still doesn't beat the signal-to-noise ratio of having humans pick them out for me. I can scroll through 200 videos on Tiktok and not find a single video worth a Like (I've found one so far from Tiktok's recommendations, and that was from a channel of a video I had previously liked). Perhaps I've misused the algorithm that does the real work for picking out content that will capture my attention, but I'm pretty disappointed. I bet the information they have about me does tell them a great deal, but it's not clear they're going to be able to keep me engaged.
