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The reason TikTok is so popular is that they show you what you want to see. Being purposely annoying and showing you things you don't want is a specific issue o
by astrange 3y ago
The reason TikTok is so popular is that they show you what you want to see. Being purposely annoying and showing you things you don't want is a specific issue of Facebook caused by letting too many PMs run wild, it's not actually a good business move.
The other reasons for it are:
- most users are not power users and don't follow a lot of people, but still want to see content
- a true chronological timeline would include bad posts (an acquaintance who spams or mass-RTs annoying content) and misses good ones (important life updates from your friends 12 hours ago)
- timbit42 3y agoThis is also how Mastodon works but there is no algorithm. You can follow other people but then you see everything they post and, for me, much of it isn't interesting to me, so I'm only following a couple of people. Instead I follow hashtags. Twitter lets you search for hashtags but doesn't let you follow them, allowing them to show up in your feed. Hashtags ensure I'm only seeing posts that are related to my interests. So Mastodon gives you similar benefits to TikTok's algorithm but gives you full control of it. Eventually, TikTok will be seeking to make even more money and will change the algorithm to benefit itself more than the user. Any social media run by shareholders seeking profit will eventually enshitify this way, as we've already seen with almost all other shareholder controlled businesses.
- astrange 3y agoFacebook isn't controlled by shareholders, it's controlled by Zuck. The share price going up does make it easier to recruit employees.