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Comment by Polylactic_acid | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an unusual use case. Surely a recommendation system should try to find content that matches the users interests. I'm not sure why anyone would want a recommendation system that looks for age/gender/race as that seems fairly irrelevant to interesting content.

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I’d say there are countless of valid use cases where this is relevant. Maybe you normally live in (or plan to travel to, or just curious about) X country but TikTok is incapable of understanding you’re only interested in videos from there. Maybe you enjoy watching 20-something year old Asian girls dance, maybe you enjoy watching 20-something white guys skateboarding, maybe you enjoy watching guys with sixpack exercise, maybe you enjoy watching party/club videos, maybe you enjoy watching people cook cakes, etc.

YouTube and Instagram is easily capable of recommending whatever content you show interest in.. TikTok on the other hand feels like the reddit’s /r/popular experience which simply looks at your location and recommend a list of random stuff that people in same area have shown interest in (and completely fail to integrate your interests into this feed). I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but all this hype about their algorithm makes no sense.

If sorting by gender/phenotype/age is your squee, you might have better luck with NSFW sites.

Are you implying that the only valid use case for liking specific types of videos is sexual gratification?

No. I'm stating that if gender/phenotype/age constitutes your prism, explicit fare is the only form of (one-hand casual) video entertainment coming to mind which explicitly categorises by those axes.

I mean, I heard from a friend, who certainly wasn't involved with making any of the stuff, that that's how such sites operate.

(Today I had some trouble searching for "Micro-abrasive Imperial Lapping Film" until I expanded the acronym. Doesn't Google realise I have a connector tip to polish?)

Surely you can see that, as you are unable to speak every language in the world, yet you understand all media presented to you, that ALL of your media is already implicitly sorted by geography and language?

If e.g. YouTube recommended you the best items from all countries, you'd have a very bad time and would be unable to understand almost all media.

The same applies to age and gender. If you were only recommended items relevant to 90 year olds or 9 year olds, you'd have a very bad time on YouTube etc. Just because you don't notice that your media is implicitly sorted doesn't mean it isn't happening.

In fact, I actively search YouTube to watch things in languages I don't understand for audiences whose demographics I am outside. I passively get enough age-appropriate comprehensible-language content just by living in my own society.

a few examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23640033 (9 year olds, RU)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24431001 (CN, IN, RU, US)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398456 (JP, SU, US)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156310 (caucasian variety)

Now I realise I should seek out 90-year old appropriate programming. Anyone have any hints?

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2fNVztaC58

Edit: After a quick calculation, I realise I have watched music from 1943: "Blood on the Risers", "Lili Marleen", "Zog Nit Keyn Mol", "Bella Ciao", and "Катюша" are all suitable for 90-year olds to have encountered as young teens.

Well you're an extreme outlier. Typically people want age-appropriate content in a language that they speak, or, which at least has subtitles. As you point out, if this is your preference then you can use search functionalities for this purpose.

I agree I'm an outlier, but will note that young chinese don't seem to mind plenty of english in their lyrics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHLRFlKPNMA (with subtitles)

and it's not as if 80s europe wasn't full of foreign-language entertainment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOf41Xwrc4 (caveat for US HN'ers: it's a european music video. No blood, two beasts, some breasts.)

(The 80's were big hair and shoulder pads, no matter which side of the iron curtain.)

> I'm not sure why anyone would want a recommendation system that looks for age/gender/race as that seems fairly irrelevant to interesting content

You can't understand how age/gender/race is important for finding relevant content?! These are extremely important, fundamental, attributes that underpin good recommendations. I.e. they're so important that they generally go without saying, and are baked into the corpuses (e.g. your local news site doesn't recommend articles from another country, Disney's streaming service doesn't recommend knitting shows to children, etc)

Would you be happy if your Amazon Prime or Netflix account only showed items that are interesting to people aged {opposite age group to you} in {country on the other side of the world to you} who are {not your gender}?

I think you'd very quickly be surprised at how much media exists in the world and would quickly realise that you're mistaken.

I think the intention behind the OP’s post was to test how quickly you could steer the algorithm in a very specific direction.

Its such a shame that Tiktok with its massive teenage userbase doesn't have youtube's infamous recommendation system which inadvertently creates pedophilic wormholes.

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