[HN Gopher] TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works
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TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works
Author : theBashShell
Score : 227 points
Date : 2020-09-10 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| andrewla wrote:
| 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.
| Kednicma wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| If this is true... then imagine if you had an unofficial
| business relationship with these curators to tag your videos
| over other similar videos. Obviously you don't want them to be
| too obvious but when many with good viral quality just need a
| bump that could be enough to generate lots of revenue to split.
| albertshin wrote:
| if that rumor holds any water, that would be an impressive team
| of curators who have a pretty extraordinary ability to spot*
| globally favorable trends. I remember reading when FB tried to
| employ human curators for their news section, bias creeped in
| and was scrapped away. wonder what TikTok did differently.
|
| * although with popularity of TikTok, one needs to wonder if
| that team have become THE trendsetters themselves...
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Your recollection is a little bit faulty on Facebook.
|
| They had teams of editors for Trending. Then, in 2016,
| conservatives complained that there was a liberal bias (which
| I don't really think there was, except obvious lies were
| filtered out). The editors were then removed, with the result
| that Pope Francis endorsed Trump a few days before the 2016
| election.
|
| Funny how things work out, I guess.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not because of that, but because YouTube does not have
| human curators.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| fqye wrote:
| It is not possible to have a very large pool of curators that
| could 'hand-select' the 'right' content that could hook up
| people.
|
| Tictok and Toutiao in China often push irrelevant content or
| new content by new creator to users to give them potentially
| interesting things outside their usual sweet spot and also to
| give new creators chances to win followers. They are
| exceptionally good at this.
| danmg wrote:
| 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.
| hamolton wrote:
| 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.
| rootsudo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| andrewnc wrote:
| https://www.axios.com/vaping-drops-teenagers-middle-schooler...
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| Drew_ wrote:
| YouTube's recommendations are arguably just as good as
| TikTok's in my opinion. The only difference is that YouTube
| places the burden of choice on you while TikTok makes every
| choice for you.
|
| If you don't quickly find something you'd like to watch on
| YouTube you're very likely to leave and find something else
| to entertain you. Meanwhile TikTok is automatically feeding
| you an infinite source of quick and easy to digest content,
| all of which you'll probably like to some degree.
|
| YouTube could do something similar and give users an
| automatic continuous feed (ala a TV channel), but I think
| YouTube's content is much too longform to work well in this
| format. This burden of choice problem affects Netflix in
| the same way which also has superb recommendations.
| thekyle wrote:
| I also agree that YouTube's recommendations are pretty
| good. For example, I like to watch Linux distro reviews
| which are fairly niche and usually only get a few hundred
| views but my YouTube homepage is filled with them. In
| contrast, when I was testing out TikTok it mostly
| recommended me things with broad appeal like comedy skits
| and generic science videos that I think 90%+ of the
| population would find at least somewhat enjoyable.
| neves wrote:
| I just watched the sumptuous Gandhi movie and thought
| "Nice, now I'll search for some movies about the real
| Gandhi". After typing "Gand" in the remote control, there
| was Gandhi in the 5th, after searches about a more
| important historical figure: Gandalf.
|
| The first video was titled in big letters "Was Gandhi a
| racist who spanked women?".
|
| Make no evil. Duh!
| robjan wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jassany wrote:
| if you simply erase you watch history that will reset
| your recommendations, always works.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Did you click through to the profile? Did you view other
| videos from the profile?
|
| Probably why multi-part videos are so popular (you have to
| click their profile then find the part 2 video to finish the
| story they were telling).
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Sounds like a way to game the system.
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| I never thought of it like this. Just had one of those mind
| exploding moments as I realized the frequency of interactions
| on TikTok vs other platforms and the virtuous cycle it
| creates (order of magnitude more data -> better
| recommendations -> even more interactions). Thanks for this.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| They always get a response to every video that you start
| watching, making their training data much, much better than
| that of Facebook or Instagram.
| basch wrote:
| This article was popular here when it was published.
| https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...
| gcmac wrote:
| I'd say it's more likely they have super advanced/clever ways
| of doing the latter. The algorithm could be a simple dot
| product and the result could be great or terrible depending on
| how good the feature extraction is.
|
| Pulling useful features out of videos is no small task. The
| fact that everyone raves about how good the recommendations are
| indicates to me that this is where their innovation lies.
| xnx wrote:
| There's so much good meta-data (likes, comments, duration,
| sound used, views, like/view ratio, skips, loops, subscribes,
| etc.) that I'd be surprised if they were digging into the
| contents of the video at all right now.
| srean wrote:
| Almost all of those applies to YouTube, do they not ?
| htrp wrote:
| IIRC youtube vids are too long to do any useful feature
| extraction from the videos.
| srean wrote:
| The comment I was responding to mentioned a lot of
| metadata around videos, that is what I was responding to.
| btilly wrote:
| They claim to be looking at the music in the video and
| avoiding sending you to another video with the same music.
| Drew_ wrote:
| That would be the "sound used". The music in the video is
| specified/labeled before upload so there's no need to
| actually process the sound of the video.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > I'd be surprised if they were digging into the contents
| of the video at all right now.
|
| Why would you be surprised to learn TikTok is doing video
| content analysis?
| blueblisters wrote:
| It can be a) very expensive b) also very difficult to
| implement.
|
| Video understanding is an active field of research and
| I'm not sure state of the art is there yet for capturing
| nuance like engagement potential, categories etc.
| dannyw wrote:
| Bytedance has thousands of the smartest data scientists in
| China.
| rvnx wrote:
| Bytedance has thousands of Manual Labor specialists as
| well.
|
| Using ML it is very easy to tag videos.
| jakear wrote:
| They could also be digging only into audio, doing speech
| recognition on it, then clustering the text. Augment that
| with the text users have put into the video directly using
| the in-app editor and you have some pretty solid data.
| ramimac wrote:
| If that were true, it'd be interesting to see if they
| push out support for close-captioning. It's an
| accessibility push, but also would leverage a lot of the
| same capabilities...
| novok wrote:
| I would also start doing image recognition in the video
| frames, to extract things like gender, objects, etc.
| thekyle wrote:
| Would this have any advantage over just using video
| embeddings (or a sequence of frame embeddings?) which in
| theory should capture those things in vectorized form.
| coldcode wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| TikTok's homepage is like trying to figure out what Youtube is
| by scrolling through Youtube's trending tab. If you didn't know
| better, you'd think "well, I'm never checking out Youtube
| again, what the hell was that?"
|
| I thought it was just preteens dancing until I realized my
| girlfriend uses it for some sort of daily exercise routine,
| food prep / cooking, and even some sort of podcast-like thing
| where a conversation is broken up into a bunch of autoplaying
| short videos.
|
| I still couldn't be bothered to figure it out and use it
| (though I feel like I should as a self-respecting technologist
| and app developer who should know what the good people like),
| but there seems to be more there than the first impression
| reveals.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nxc18 wrote:
| Things I've been sent by TikTok in the last few days:
|
| * Cockpit walkthroughs by professional airline pilots
|
| * A first-person plane crash and water evacuation that I had
| somehow missed from 2014 (and was very interested to see)
|
| * Music theory videos explaining how current pop songs work
|
| * Baking videos explaining how to make things I'd never thought
| of before
|
| * Dermatology video showing laser skin retexturing in action
| (its amazing to see, not what I expected); helped me discover a
| new podcast that I now really enjoy
|
| * Linguistic analysis of English and how certain grammar rules
| came to be
|
| * A PSA about melatonin dosage (I already knew but discovered
| recently that most supplements are dosed too high)
|
| * HIIT cardio routines you can do at home
|
| * Planet Money TikTok (actually very solid and educational -
| e.g. economics of horror movie creation)
|
| I think the site you're talking about is YouTube, which does in
| fact repeatedly show nonsense and never figures out how wrong
| it is.
| rsa25519 wrote:
| > would not like something that just shows me more of the same
| things
|
| Me neither. Good thing TikTok provides variety and helps users
| discover new things.
|
| > But I can see how it might appear to people who just want to
| be stimulated with stuff.
|
| Don't we all? Is that not why we're on Hacker News, to find
| stimulation targeted more specifically to us than other
| websites?
| ausbah wrote:
| exactly, Hacker News is full of great and informative content
| - some of which I have actually benefitted from. however, I
| think me and anyone who uses this site must admit much of
| what is consumed goes in one ear and out the other just like
| any other media platform like reddit or YouTube. the
| difference I think is that since so much of the content is
| "smart", users here would like to think they are spending
| their time better than others
| FirstLvR wrote:
| so... wheres the code?
| oshea64bit wrote:
| I'm not quite sure how this is even remotely an expectation.
| chaotic_mind wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ..
|
| Turning the stock market into a slick slot machine with all
| the same feedback and nudges. It's sickening, but not
| surprising.
| bojanvidanovic wrote:
| > To be fair, the algorithm they told is mostly what we would
| have perceived, knowing if that is Machine Learning driven.
|
| Indeed.
| jakear wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > they'll get paid directly from TikTok, rather than needing to
| source a third party company to sponsor them.
|
| So like, what Adsense did to the internet and exactly what
| Youtube is trying to undo.
| xster wrote:
| That was the overall trend in YouTube since 2013 that makes
| sense for YouTube as a business but makes me a bit sad as a
| user. When they started to split up YouTube picked out the
| top, corporate friendly creators to let advertisers pick and
| choose how to target their (eventually content self-
| censoring) advertising money rather than offering YouTube as
| a whole bundle and letting the keyword auction do its work
| opaquely. This creates to inevitable incentive problem down
| the road we're all witnessing now such as asymmetrical
| content id powers, no monetization for grassroot creators,
| content censorship etc.
| Firebrand wrote:
| I've been seeing a lot of low to mid-tier creators dropping out
| of the payment program lately after their view counts
| plummeted. It's speculated that TikTok only pays for video
| completion count while enrolled in the Creator Fund since view
| counts tend to go back up after leaving.
|
| Having more leverage with third parties outweighs the tens of
| dollars they'd receive from a video, I guess.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| 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.
| jakear wrote:
| Reducing engagement data to 0/1 would lose a lot of precious
| data, it treats getting 50s through a 1m video worse than
| watching the whole of a 5s clip, and watching a 2s clip the
| same as watching a 2s clip on loop 20 times because it's so
| incredible. Given the point of the app is to get people on it
| for a long time, it would make much more sense to track
| number of seconds watched and train to maximize that.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Like, this probably isn't how I would implement such a
| system. But it's an important explanation for how TikTok
| does such good recommendations.
|
| It's a HN comment, not an in-depth blog post :)
| benreesman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| lalos wrote:
| You don't have that equivalent signal, that's what
| matters. i.e. Twitter doesn't know if you even finished
| reading the tweet which is what is providing a strong
| signal in the case of TikTok, skipped vs watched once vs
| watched multiple times.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Facebook and Twitter are social-graph subscription-based
| services. TikTok just gives recomendations without
| subscriptions while knowing nothing about my social
| graph.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| 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).
| hooande wrote:
| I spend hours per day browsing tweets. Nothing about this
| algorithm seems to be groundbreaking. TikTok has a strong
| brand and is benefiting from that
| pb7 wrote:
| What surprises you about the unsupervised learning?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Normally supervised learning is much, much more effective.
| wenc wrote:
| I wonder if for random content discovery, unsupervised
| learning methods are less likely to be overconstrained by
| independent variables, and hence are freer to make better
| open-ended recommendations.
|
| Supervised algorithms almost assume too much about a user
| -- they assume the correlation structures that are true
| in the past are also likely to hold in the future. This
| assumption holds in deterministic environments, but is
| false or unnecessarily constraining in stochastic
| domains, where it is widely known simple models and
| heuristics tend to perform much better.
|
| I feel "new content discovery" is more of a stochastic
| problem rather than a deterministic one (which is the
| environment most conventional recommendation engines
| dwell in, hence most rec engines only make conservative
| recommendations).
|
| For all we know TikTok's algorithm could simply be a
| combination of rules of thumb + simple clusters +
| randomization that happen to work well. I've seen so many
| instances (in real life) where simple models vastly
| outperform complex models in stochastic situations.
|
| (p.s. in my opinion, YouTube's recommendations tend to be
| rather on the deterministic side. My recommendations seem
| to be mostly based on what I've watched and liked in the
| past and so the recs tend to be a bit boring. It clearly
| works great for YouTube from a monetization perspective,
| but it doesn't unearth a lot of interesting new content
| for me -- I have to search for those.)
| xnx wrote:
| I've also found that TikTok does a good job of throwing in
| unexpected videos to test the waters of what the user is
| interested in. This diversity is one of my favorite things
| about it.
| sleepydog wrote:
| I wish youtube was better in this regard. The videos it shows
| me just keep getting more and more focused on what it knows
| I'm interested in, to the point that it's boring. I discover
| new things to watch through reddit instead.
| loxs wrote:
| Yeah, youtube is super boring. It just suggests my top N
| most watched channels, even years after I stop watching
| some of them, as I lost interest in the topic. For example
| I used to watch lots of vsauce, numberphille, veritasium
| etc but I gradually lost interest as they slowly morphed
| from genuine scientific shows into ads for their books or
| paid shows. Guess what, youtube still regularly recommends
| them, even though I rarely click some of these suggestions.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| What I really wish was that Youtube would show me videos
| related to the video I'm currently watching, not just
| related to my general watching history.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It does for me? The ones which are history driven say
| "recommended for you" next to them, but most seem to be
| related to the video itself. Maybe this is due to almost
| exclusively using it for music.
| pizza wrote:
| I wish the recommendation algorithm had knobs users could
| manipulate. eg
|
| - show me things that have < 20 views
|
| - reduce the weight of popular channels
|
| - don't send me into a political content feedback loop
|
| - prefer to show me short videos
|
| - show me something wildly outside my tastes every now and
| then
|
| I just got the Youtube Music app and it had very crude
| music recommendation options. You have to pick from a pre-
| selected list of artists. If you click on an artist, it
| adds another row of tangentially-related artists, _but only
| sometimes_.
|
| Suppose you like electronic music, but only niche
| electronic music. Basically you have to click on Daft Punk,
| and _hope_ it gives you something closer to what you like,
| leap-frogging towards e.g. Actress.
|
| It doesn't even let you just _type in what you like_..,
| music that you _know_ is already available on Youtube. If I
| had to guess, that 's probably because of stupid copyright
| shit, but if that's the case, then why can I listen to the
| probably-violating-the-TOS music in the app if I just
| search for it myself?? Makes no sense...
| majormajor wrote:
| The biggest problem in user-facing software right now is
| that product managers assume they + an algorithm can
| figure out what you want based on behavior, and that you
| shouldn't have any direct input in that. The best you'll
| usually see is an "i don't like this" button.
|
| Spotify sidesteps some of this by just giving you a bunch
| of different algorithms feeding different playlists, so
| at least there are options, but I miss having settings to
| tweak to gain more control, or to point it in the right
| direction better.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > The biggest problem in user-facing software right now
| is that product managers assume they + an algorithm can
| figure out what you want based on behavior
|
| Given Tik Tok's success, this appears to be a correct
| assumption.
|
| For every 1 engineer who wants ten different knobs to use
| the app like a power user, there are 100 or more regular
| users who don't want anywhere near that much complexity.
|
| Catering to the power users only makes sense if they're
| your core market. For most public-facing apps, especially
| free apps, creating and maintaining power user level
| controls is far more trouble than it's worth.
| majormajor wrote:
| TikTok appears to let their algorithm do a lot more
| random walking than other companies. That's in some ways
| different from power user knobs, but it serves a similar
| purpose in exploring a broader area instead of assuming
| they can intuit everything from previously-collected
| data.
|
| That's an improved default that fits well for their app.
| But infinite scroll is not the only use case in the
| world.
|
| This assumption that "what works for [one app] is the
| path I should follow because that app has been
| successful" is frustrating and shortsighted.
| rurp wrote:
| I hate the modern software trend of disallowing explicit
| filtering. On everything from Youtube to Netflix the user
| is limited to typing in what they want and hoping the
| algorithm correctly reads their mind. If it doesn't,
| you're left trying to trick it into searching on what you
| want or looking for an outside resource where another
| person has already done the grunt work.
| jzymbaluk wrote:
| A common comment I see on Tiktok videos is something like
| "I've finally made it to [niche interest] tiktok", it's
| something I've experienced myself when the algorithm started
| showing me videos from the crew on cargo ships as they talk
| about their favorite ports to dock at, or their experience
| going through E.G the Panama Canal. I don't know any other
| platform that emergently figures out that I have an interest
| in international logistics without me specifically searching
| for it, and it's one of the reasons TikTok is such a great
| platform for content.
| baddox wrote:
| The exact same thing happens for me on YouTube, although I
| guess YouTube doesn't start with an auto-playing random
| sequence of videos to quick-start the search for videos you
| find interesting. Still though, I end up in very odd niches
| that I never specifically searched for.
| Aromasin wrote:
| One thing I will say is that I feel YouTube doesn't do
| this to nearly as large of degree as TikTok. YouTube
| might suggest me videos that are outside my cluster of
| interests occasionally, but normally only those with a
| reasonably high view count. They will recommend low view
| count videos that are within my interests however.
|
| TikTok on the other hand will sometimes show me a video
| with almost no views, that is completely random, and I
| actually do like it. I feel like YouTube has gotten
| slightly stale in that it tries so hard to show me either
| viral videos or videos it deems to be of my interests,
| that the content becomes repetitive. In recent months
| it's become better at it, but still plays it safe with
| recommendations.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Dude that sounds super interesting, can you share?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Neat. Do you use/click on tags in video description ? (I am
| afraid the niche I found might get replaced by another
| niche).
| lowwave wrote:
| Wikipedia has Random article for ages now. All TikTik did was
| put on a nicer UI. Of course UI are important most user are
| suckers for that stuff. However I found there really aren't
| any new ideas left just implementations.
| icelancer wrote:
| A new implementation is a new idea.
| lowwave wrote:
| yeah, personally a new idea is a new idea. Personally
| nothing is new. Everything has being done before.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| > 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).
|
| Similar experience here. One night a few months ago my
| girlfriend and I decided to download it as a joke. We laughed
| at some videos for a while and went to sleep. A couple months
| later she'd spend hours upon hours every day looking at it,
| even foregoing some of her hobbies. Eventually she realized it
| was too much and also uninstalled it.
| tpetry wrote:
| The idea to sprinkle in different videos is just for the
| algorithm that the bias is not more justified: You like X, i
| feed you only X, i learn that you absolutely love X.
| bilater wrote:
| I mean it's just Collaborative filtering no?
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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...
|
| [2]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks...
| tqi wrote:
| 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.
| blululu wrote:
| TLDR: We do some math 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.
| zwieback wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| zwieback wrote:
| 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.distractify.com/p/elite-tiktok-meaning
| dannyw wrote:
| Don't forget niches like Witchtok.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| 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
| cblconfederate wrote:
| It s a company the US can easily block without impact in other
| business. Instead shutting down huawei or other big chinese
| companies causes major reshuffling
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The real threat is that it allows China to get a foothold into
| the international tech game, and thus allows them to become
| more powerful in comparison with their adversaries.
|
| Which is a legitimate threat to some people, but it's not that
| much of a threat to the common man.
| red_hare wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| oh its 1000% a proxy for income. No doubt about it.
| rvnx wrote:
| Like Tinder checks your phone model to understand whether or
| not you are attractive (iPhone users have boost)
| jordache wrote:
| 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?
| rvz wrote:
| > flavor of the month/year?
|
| Actually, yes. This particular generation will eventually grow
| out of TikTok like they did with other social networks at their
| peak of the hype cycle: Snapchat (2014), YikYak (2014), Vine
| (2015), Shots (2012) and SNOW (2016) etc.
|
| TikTok is no different and yet another hype masterpiece for the
| record books and the news media. The new kids will find another
| one to replace it and suddenly it will be crowned as 'cool'.
|
| Rinse and Repeat for another generation.
| jordache wrote:
| ha Vine
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| Yes. Very much so. What happened to them?
| wombatmobile wrote:
| How many minutes have you spent watching TikTok?
| jordache wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| Drew_ wrote:
| None of these problems your listing are relevant to TikTok
| at all. You don't seem to be familiar with how TikTok works
| or how immensely popular is world wide.
| DanBC wrote:
| > random dance videos?
|
| There's so much more to Tiktok than random dance videos.
| SomaticPirate wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Facebook's dlrm is good one. There's libffm, xlearn etc. I
| found dlrm to be good choice between extensible and fast.
| novaRom wrote:
| 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.
| gazelleeatslion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What are you concerned about? What is "running wild" and
| how would you regulate it?
| tucif wrote:
| If services were compelled to opensource at some growth point,
| would you have them be compelled to ensure their codebase is
| readable?
|
| I'm just imagining that scenario and companies choosing to
| "opensource" their obfuscated/assembly code.
| slykar wrote:
| > Provide clear option to opt-out
|
| I would say there's a very good option to opt-out of TikTok -
| don't use it.
|
| Facebook is much harder to opt-out, as they can track you even
| if you don't have an account.
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| I think your tone is a little abrupt, but I'm all for laws that
| mandate, at the very least, high level descriptions of data
| processing algorithms.
|
| A bit of random adjunct, but if I buy a piece of KFC, how would
| I know if I'm allergic to one of the 11 herbs and spices, if
| the company isn't legally obliged to reveal it?
|
| Likewise, how would you know if a company is processing data
| for a nefarious end, if you don't know how it's processed?
|
| I know alruism seems unlikely, but how can you be so sure?
| Reedx wrote:
| 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.
| conradfr wrote:
| I guess that's why there is short video suggestions now in the
| Youtube app.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| I noticed this just this week! I've found it refreshing
| watching 30-60 second clips of very random things I wouldn't
| care about otherwise.
|
| I'm not sure if this has anything to do with my general
| preference for sub 5-minute videos that just get to the
| point.
| sbilstein wrote:
| I wish I had data on the average length of youtube videos over
| time. I swear 5 years ago an explainer video or a game review
| would be less than 5 minutes consistently, which is what I
| personally want from a platform like youtube, a digestible
| snack of information. Nowadays career youtubers are often
| pushing well over 10 minutes which just occupies too much of my
| time to be worth the distraction.
| milquetoastaf wrote:
| The answer, of course, is ads. You get more roll time if you
| hit the 10 min mark, even if its just slightly over
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I used to watch YouTube now it is the place of last resort
| for any content or explanation because its too slow. I once
| had to spend 9 minutes watching a video about how to get a
| tricky gasket out of a spot on my truck. The short answer is
| that you take a 3/4 inch threaded pipe twist it into the
| gasket and pull down. The long answer was a 9 minute video.
| Almost always, when a link takes me you YouTube, I just
| assume I don't need to know that bad. Its like a recipe site
| that can't be scrolled or searched.
|
| I really moss when people wrote what they did in little
| snpits on blogs.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > TikTok removed those 9 minutes, so it feels very refreshing
| in that respect. There's no incentive to create filler - just
| the opposite.
|
| It's to a point that I skip any TikTok video that starts like
| "I was in the forest and found this mushroom. Did you know that
| this kind of mushroom can be used to... ". I skip it as soon as
| I hear "I was in the" (that and the usual tone that comes with
| it).
|
| I don't care. Show me directly what you are doing with the
| mushroom.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Yeah I wish TikTok has variable speed / fast forward option.
| Another factor for ML to train and automatically speed up to
| the juicy bits. There's a lot of room to waste even in 1
| minute formats. Though TikTok itself is mostly time wasting
| and this remark is more an indictment of my attention span.
| novok wrote:
| Is it possible to scrub videos / skip around in tiktok?
| I've tried googling it but to no avail.
| wenc wrote:
| Most people are familiar the standard narrative arc structure
| (which makes for compelling storytelling):
|
| normalcy -> conflict -> (rising action to) climax ->
| resolution.
|
| In flash fiction (i.e. very short fiction), the same elements
| exist, but due to brevity constraints, it starts the story in
| the middle, i.e. the point of conflict or climax, and then
| resolves the other parts along the way.
|
| I think creators who understand how to exploit this structure
| could potentially make some really compelling short videos.
|
| Example:
|
| "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Is reinforcing that behaviour not worrying to you?
|
| Being able to get consistent, instant stimulation from doing
| effectively nothing seems dangerous to me.
|
| We're training ourselves to not be able to focus on anything.
| panopticon wrote:
| > _YouTube incentivizes creators to make artificially long
| videos, resulting in a huge amount of filler._
|
| Given how popular obnoxious jump cuts are on YouTube, I would
| assume this wasn't the case. What part of YouTube incentivizes
| this?
|
| I always attributed the increased intros/outros/ad spot/filler
| lengths to the general trend of YouTube getting more
| "professional" than it did 10 years ago.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Mid-roll ads on Youtube require a minimum length of 8
| minutes. So if you're making videos shorter than that you're
| losing a monetization opportunity.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > What part of YouTube incentivizes this?
|
| Advertising placements. If a video is longer than eight
| minutes (formerly ten minutes), it's eligible for "midroll"
| ads and will earn the creator more money.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| Historically YouTube would downregulate short videos in their
| algorithms. The cutoff was 10 minutes, if I remember
| correctly. So the biggest content creators got used to
| stretching out any video to at least 10 minutes. I think
| YouTube has relaxed that a bit recently.
|
| Which is funny in the greater historical context, because in
| the early days of YouTube you couldn't upload videos longer
| than 10 minutes.
|
| EDIT: As an aside, YouTube's algorithms also punish you if
| you aren't regularly uploading content. It was really a
| perfect storm of shitiness where content creators needed to
| pump out content constantly, while also ensuring those videos
| were all 10 minutes or longer. It drastically affected the YT
| landscape. Content creators like Noah Caldwell Gervais who
| only sporadically release content because they spend HUGE
| amounts of effort on what they do release were getting
| slammed by the algorithm. Again, the algorithm has gotten a
| little better in that regard over the years. Though it's
| gotten worse in other ways.
| baddox wrote:
| I believe the 10 minute thing is because YouTube at some
| point let you include mid-roll ads if your video was longer
| than 10 minutes.
| rvnx wrote:
| Yes the 10 minutes unlock you significant monetization
| options
| jrockway wrote:
| 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.
| dirtyid wrote:
| YT channels with frequent update formats are 10-20% filler
| with intro/endcard/credits/sponsors. Most talk slow enough
| that they can be comfortably watched at 2x speed. Channels
| like contrapoints - irregular long form content that's
| usually demonetized and funded via patreon doesn't waste your
| time as much. But they're still paced differently than
| TikToks which bias towards brevity. There's still some
| tedious videos... lots of old codger maker content that takes
| the full minute to show 10 second worth of content, but from
| my experience, that's still shorter than sitting through
| youtube filler.
| Reedx wrote:
| Yeah, I'm making a generalization about the platform and what
| it incentivizes. It's definitely not to say that all channels
| create filler.
|
| Being logged in and curating really makes all the difference.
| ContraPoints, CGP Grey, Joe Rogan, Kurzgesagt - I think that
| kind of content shines on YouTube, isn't possible on TikTok,
| and don't see them as artificially long.
| baddox wrote:
| I don't find much filler among the areas of interest that I
| specifically follow on YouTube (some of that of course being
| due to my own selection of who to subscribe to), but I do
| find that filler on YouTube when I'm searching for some other
| instructional information on Google.
| canada_dry wrote:
| > incentivizes creators to make artificially long videos
|
| One of the reasons I use a FF addon to make the default speed
| of all youtube videos 1.5X. So few v-bloggers are succinct and
| fluid enough to have to listen at 1X.
| return1 wrote:
| Like Twitter v Facebook
| SeanFerree wrote:
| I would not be sad if tiktok was shut down
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