6 ms·
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 look
by jakear 6y ago
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.
- 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.
- theshrike79 6y agoWhat 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 6y agoIt 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.
- johnisgood 6y agoYeah, oddly enough all the recommendations are videos I have already watched, even liked. I remember when recommendations on the right side were "similar" music to the one I was listening to, this way I could find music. I cannot do this anymore. :/
- pizza 6y agoI 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 6y agoThe 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 6y ago> 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.
- reportgunner 6y agoSign out and wipe the cookies, you will get curveballs from youtube constantly.
- jzymbaluk 6y agoA 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.
- johnchristopher 6y agoNeat. Do you use/click on tags in video description ? (I am afraid the niche I found might get replaced by another niche).
- deanCommie 6y agoDude that sounds super interesting, can you share?
- baddox 6y agoThe 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 6y agoOne 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.
- lowwave 6y agoWikipedia 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.
- Firebrand 6y agoI'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 6y agoI 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.
- pb7 6y agoWhat surprises you about the unsupervised learning?
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoNormally supervised learning is much, much more effective.
- wenc 6y agoI 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.)
- tpetry 6y agoThe 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.
- Scoundreller 6y ago> 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 6y agoThat 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.
- Kaze404 6y ago> 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.
- dwild 6y ago> 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 just push the creators to try to keep the viewer the longer by pushing the actual content further and further into their 1 minute.