15 ms·
TikTok reveals details of how its algorithm works
- zwieback 6y agoNot 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.
- dannyw 6y agoDon't forget niches like Witchtok.
- vii 6y agoThe 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-elite-alt-tiktok-and-what-has-it-got-to-do-with-donald-trump https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/22/what-is-elit...
- zwieback 6y agoThese 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
- jordache 6y agodon'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?
- DanBC 6y ago> random dance videos? There's so much more to Tiktok than random dance videos.
- wombatmobile 6y agoHow many minutes have you spent watching TikTok?
- jordache 6y agoi 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.
- Drew_ 6y agoNone 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.
- Semaphor 6y ago> 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.
- Kednicma 6y agoHere'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 6y agoIf 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 6y agoif 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 6y agoYour 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 6y agoIt 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.
- rootsudo 6y agoHeh, "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 6y agoI 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 6y agoI 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 6y agohttps://www.axios.com/vaping-drops-teenagers-middle-schoolers-320c089b-b3f2-4ea9-bba6-1bda54ff7539.html https://www.axios.com/vaping-drops-teenagers-middle-schooler...
- ChefboyOG 6y agoI 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 6y agoMore 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?
- judge2020 6y ago> 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 6y agoSounds like a way to game the system.
- ChefboyOG 6y agoI 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.
- coldcode 6y agoMaybe 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoAgreed. 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.
- rsa25519 6y ago> 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 6y agoexactly, 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
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
- jakear 6y agoIt'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.
- xnx 6y agoI'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 6y agoI 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 6y agoYeah, 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.
- gazelleeatslion 6y agoDoes 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 6y agoYou 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 6y agoFair 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 6y agoWhat are you concerned about? What is "running wild" and how would you regulate it?
- tucif 6y agoIf 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 6y ago
- danmg 6y agoHow 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.
- FirstLvR 6y agoso... wheres the code?
- oshea64bit 6y agoI'm not quite sure how this is even remotely an expectation.
- chaotic_mind 6y agoTo 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.
- bojanvidanovic 6y ago> To be fair, the algorithm they told is mostly what we would have perceived, knowing if that is Machine Learning driven. Indeed.
- TheJoeMan 6y agoI 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 6y agoIt'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-year-old-robinhood-customer-dies-by-suicide-after-seeing-a-730000-negative-balance/ 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.
- karaterobot 6y agoI 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-users-discrimination/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks-beijing-roots-fuel-censorship-suspicion-it-builds-huge-us-audience/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks...
- SeanFerree 6y agoI would not be sad if tiktok was shut down
- undefined1 6y agoTikTok 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoYT 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 6y ago
- jbverschoor 6y agoI 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
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe 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.
- cblconfederate 6y agoIt 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
- erklik 6y agoIts 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 6y agoWhy 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 6y agoThe 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.
- SomaticPirate 6y agoDoes 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 6y agoFacebook's dlrm is good one. There's libffm, xlearn etc. I found dlrm to be good choice between extensible and fast.
- bilater 6y agoI mean it's just Collaborative filtering no?
- blululu 6y agoTLDR: 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.
- andrewla 6y agoOne 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.
- red_hare 6y agoI 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 6y agooh its 1000% a proxy for income. No doubt about it.
- novaRom 6y agoThe 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.
- hamolton 6y agoWhat'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.
- tqi 6y agoDevil 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.
- rdxm 6y agothis is the worst kind of facile bull s*. further, it is mind-blowingly naive vis-a-vis basic espionage. this has to be a paid PR piece for tiktok. not surprising given the reality of current "journalism", but tedious none-the-less....
- lbacaj 6y agoI 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.
- Mascobot 6y agoWell, 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.
- blackrock 6y agoIt’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 6y agoHuawei had a systematic campaign to steal American IP while offering direct cash incentives to employees who stole it.
- jariel 6y agoCan 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.