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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

More 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?

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I don't buy this argument. YouTube ostensibly has a metric ton of information like this and even if tiktok has more training data now, I'm fairly sure their training data in principle was smaller than what YouTube historically had given their decades long presence and their ubiquity in the internet.

This is on top of the documented effort by YouTube to perfect their recommendation algorithm using the best ML minds they got [1] only to polarizing response from its users.

Clearly tiktok has other advantages (homogeneity in some content characteristics, viz. Extremely short videos which probably correlates to their simplicity) and has clearly tuned a fundamentally better recommendation algorithm that even the minds at Google brain couldn't figure out.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-b...

YouTube has the problem that all Google products have: they put you in a filter bubble which you can never get out of. The algorithm also optimises for more "long form" content and it's pretty well known that the optimum video length is around 10 mins.

if you simply erase you watch history that will reset your recommendations, always works.

I just watched the sumptuous Gandhi movie and thought "Nice, now I'll search for some movies about the real Gandhi". After typing "Gand" in the remote control, there was Gandhi in the 5th, after searches about a more important historical figure: Gandalf.

The first video was titled in big letters "Was Gandhi a racist who spanked women?".

Make no evil. Duh!

YouTube's recommendations are arguably just as good as TikTok's in my opinion. The only difference is that YouTube places the burden of choice on you while TikTok makes every choice for you.

If you don't quickly find something you'd like to watch on YouTube you're very likely to leave and find something else to entertain you. Meanwhile TikTok is automatically feeding you an infinite source of quick and easy to digest content, all of which you'll probably like to some degree.

YouTube could do something similar and give users an automatic continuous feed (ala a TV channel), but I think YouTube's content is much too longform to work well in this format. This burden of choice problem affects Netflix in the same way which also has superb recommendations.

I also agree that YouTube's recommendations are pretty good. For example, I like to watch Linux distro reviews which are fairly niche and usually only get a few hundred views but my YouTube homepage is filled with them. In contrast, when I was testing out TikTok it mostly recommended me things with broad appeal like comedy skits and generic science videos that I think 90%+ of the population would find at least somewhat enjoyable.

> I also agree that YouTube's recommendations are pretty good. For example, I like to watch Linux distro reviews which are fairly niche and usually only get a few hundred views but my YouTube homepage is filled with them

This is exactly its main weakness. Once it finds one or two things you like, you're hardly ever going to see anything diversity, and if you ever do, it won't be long before that thing completely fills your feed.

I have two Google accounts, and I switch between them for non-YouTube-related reasons. The one is currently all Periodic Videos all the time, the other is all History Matters all the time. It's not as if I lose all interest in chemistry if I switch accounts. If I have a few minutes to kill, I'll end up thinking "History Matters isn't exactly what I want to watch, but I don't want to spend ten minutes trying to find something else", so I watch it, and the algorithm pats itself on the back and cues up another one of the same.

I 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.

Glad I was able to help introduce you to that idea. I was first introduced to it by Peter Norvig (Google): https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

> 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).

Sounds like a way to game the system.

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