In my case the recommendations had nothing to do with what I had liked or shown interest in. It was equivalent to visiting Reddit’s /r/popular, which might appeal to most people, but from an algorithmic perspective then there’s nothing impressive about it. Like I also mentioned in another comment, I think there’s nothing wrong with this approach, I just don’t understand how people can be impressed by it from a technical point of view.
> If you are looking to fetishise young Asian women, then maybe you are on the wrong type of website (and: maybe you shouldn't do this).
I was just trying to conduct the most simple experiment imaginable to see whether it was actually capable of detecting what I showed interest in and do so in a way that I could easily verify the results. What I was looking for in the experiment represent perhaps 20% of the userbase, yet it was still incapable of displaying a single post that matched what I was trying to achieve (because the feed just show what they believe is interesting in your area). I could also have tried to achieve something more complex, like train TikTok to show skateboarding videos (which might represent less than 0.001% of their videos), but I figured I’d try with the easiest thing imaginable first (which it failed at).
And I fail to see why there’s anything wrong with being interested in watching content of people within a certain age group, or gender, or nationality..
If I were a TikTok user then I’d surely hope that they were able to recommend my videos to people that were interested in the kind of content I posted (because that would open up a lot of possibilities, like meeting people with similar interests, selling products, etc.)