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Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

> Reels' video distribution algorithm will resemble TikTok's: users will see the most popular videos at the moment, rather than a selection tailored to their individual profile.

That's not how TikTok works, the feed is really good at tailoring to the stuff you actually like to watch. It's a big part of why it's so popular.

> Reels differs from TikTok thanks to Instagram's augmented reality effects, which let users overlay images and filters onto their videos.

TikTok has had AR filters for a long time now...

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Whenever finding stuff like this, I always wonder: do the authors know, and expect their audience doesn't? do the authors not know, and neither does the audience? I get the "you know your own field better than the writer" effect, but a very large group of people use and at least sort of know how TikTok works, right?

> Whenever finding stuff like this, I always wonder: do the authors know, and expect their audience doesn't?

Do you mean the superficial author of the piece or the author of the PR material they are regurgitating?

My guess is someone involved with the latter function knows what is going on in the market and is deliberately being deceptive (but probably not outright lying, the release itself probably doesn't claim that TikTok lacks the described features though it is probably written in a way which gives that impression), the former may or may not know, but probably doesn't care; the better a stenographer they are the more access they get.

The average Axios reader does not use TikTok and the average Axios reporter probably doesn't either.

I dislike Reel already. I follow wood working, RC cars, and metal fab/3D printing/CNC. Now when I browse it's nothing but women jumping around and showing off their clothes... WTH!? So I start saying, not interested to all of that, still spams me with it.

Probably because that's what the majority of the content on Instagram is. It's likely that content you enjoy hasnt been created yet.

That's not true, I use Instagram for checking out CNC/3d printing/robotics projects.

They meant on Reel.

You have to train the feed. A few days on Tik Tok aggressively disliking things you don't want to see and liking things you do, and it becomes an unending stream of interesting content. A single dislike won't do it alone though.

>nothing but women jumping around

That’s basically how TikTok started.

> That's not how TikTok works, the feed is really good at tailoring to the stuff you actually like to watch

I think the author here is differentiating on the pool of available videos to show you. TikTok will show you anything (that fits your profile) from any user, which is markedly different from just showing you content from your social graph.

They are comparing it to Reels, which also shows you content primarily not on your social graph.

The AR claim is a claim that was made by instragram's head of product (who is quoted in other articles). The author presumably just wrote up the article and didn't bother to check that what Instagram are claiming is actually true.

The part about the algorithm might be referring to when you first join TikTok. THEN it shows you the most popular videos at the moment, adjusting quickly to a more personalized feed based on viewing/interaction behaviors.

Half the people writing articles about these apps have never actually used them.

Not only that but the machine learning models on those ARs are so successful that judging from our context (of non-Chinese apps we're normally exposed to), I'd be semi-surprised that we can algorithmically apply makeup so correctly with ambient lighting on a single still frame on a compute server, much less locally, in real-time on a low powered phone.

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