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From the article: "I doubt anyone in tech will find the description [of the algorithm] anything but obvious."

But TikTok is definitely special in this regard.

If you actually use TikTok for any length of time, you can see how remarkable it is. It learns extremely quickly what you want to see (and what you don't want to see), and provides it accurately and in apparently infinite quantity.

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The same behaviour with YouTube caused widespread concern (Elsagate).

The only difference being TikTok uses a lot more human moderation compared with YouTube.

I don't find their recommendation system any special as opposed to their specific operational model.

YouTube recommendation sucks. It keeps recommending the same thing to you. Sometimes, videos from a few years ago just because you watched one video from this guy. TikTok recommendation system recommend a variety of clips and almost all of them are interesting to you. I go to YouTube if I know what I am going to watch, it has so much content, but I hate it when it automatically change the homepage after you clicked on one of the video.

That's not my experience, especially lately. I have lots of different topics on my YouTube feed. Topics that are specific as well as more general topics. Time and date of access is also relevant as well.

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