Seems obvious that showing people relevant, quality content drives engagement more than showing unrelatable, boring stuff from your long-lost friends and politi

Seems obvious that showing people relevant, quality content drives engagement more than showing unrelatable, boring stuff from your long-lost friends and politically extreme uncle. Driving engagement is something FB and IG have always had as their North Star, just with the self-imposed limitation of using your friend network to do it. Now that they see what TikTok has done they want that juicier business instead. It's a bummer that there doesn't seem to be a great place to grow or maintain old/distant friendships (like the early days of FB) but hopefully this will open space for smaller players to get involved in that, if anyone has any time left in their day for it... An interesting next step would be to generate real-world friendships from TikTok's acutely tuned interest graph. Friendships are still mostly outcomes of a certain circumstance in the meatspace. You met at a party, or are the friend of a friend etc. It's a really weak algorithm for finding the right people to hang out with IRL.