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Comment by pbw | Hacker News Reader

I agree TikTok is doing something different from the other guys. The amazing thing is that it's been out for 5 years and no one has copied what it does. Although I'd guess the algorithm has gotten a lot better over time as well, so it might be a moving target for the others.

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I don't know if anyone in this thread uses YouTube, but its algorithm is insanely quick to adapt and videos you see on home page and in recommendations entirely depend on what you have watched before. Watch a video, see your home page change; watch a ton and it will reflect your preferences. (It also makes an attempt to list the topics it thinks you prefer and offers additional separate home page for each, as well as one for videos not matching any topic but still possibly of interest to you.)

Everything about TikTok's algorithmic malleability can be said about YouTube, so I am confused as to why this is news to anyone.

One difference is that YT also has longer videos. Unlike fixed-length blurbs of TT, this increases the challenge for recommendation algorithms, but I welcome this heterogeneity.

YouTube's recommendation must be device dependent or something, because I only use it through AppleTV or as a Playstation App and the entire page is like 15 or 20 videos repeated over and over, like sometimes it will suggest the same video in two different places on the screen.

Account privacy settings/history tracking can radically affect the outcome, as registering what you watch is required for learning from it (by making which its main feature TikTok excused themselves from offering such privacy controls).

Personally am using it through web only.

I feel like YT is too quick to adapt and adapts too fully. If I pick up a new interest and watch videos on it for a bit, then that's all I see in recommendations; it's like my old interests don't exist any more and I have to remember to search them again.

I had a similar impression for a time (I felt like they decided to 'tiktokify' the recommendation system too much) but I find I see a decent mix after a while, although I definitely wish some topics did not fade out if I didn't watch them for a while.

I wish we didn't need to reverse-engineer recommendation algorithms.

This is very true. YT algorithm is scarily good. Now if I really need it, I only browse YouTube for something specific in incognito mode.

Last year I spent an insane amount of hours watching what I thought was a mix of entertainment and educational videos but everything is entertainment on YouTube or as it seems in all the social networks. I’m not against entertainment but I want to be in control when I seek it, not letting myself be hooked by those algorithms all the time every day. They are so scary because they work too well.

You Tube's algorithm is not scarily good, it's scarily bad. It 100% over indexes on something that you watch and will then continuously send out tons of videos almost exactly like that. No discovery, no exploration - it simply sees something and then swarms you with it. The exact reason you need incognito mode to hide from it.

The other thing it does, is continuously offer people extreme content of whatever genre because it thinks it can get high engagement. Whether it's UFOs, alt-right radicalizaion, or conspiracy theory of the day it constantly serves up content from the extremes of society because the people that do watch it typically become obsessive. The behavior of the people most susecptible to the fringes, because they watch so much youtube has enormous impact on what the majority of us see. YTs algorithm is absolute trash.

There is a bunch of amazing content on Youtube, but I never find it due to recommendations. Only due to external pages that link to it which then show links to other related items. YT native recommendation is terrible.

Watch a video and get recommendations for 30 other videos posted by that person, and 15 other videos on almost the exact same topic covering what you just saw. And then mixed in a few "Top 40" style videos from the genere you're in. Ie something barely unrelated, but is obviously popular. Absolute trash.

My experience with YouTube is different. I get a decent mix of indie filmmaking advice and screenwriting tips, engineering, Russia-Ukraine updates, britcom and infotainment, cute animals. I did not do any special "training", it's all organic (apart from me clicking "do not recommend this channel ever again" from time to time).

I dislike YouTube but not as much as TikTok. One makes you choose what to watch, but the other has no long-form content whatsoever. One of is motivated by greed, but the other is backed by CCP.

Recommendations reflect what you want to watch, not what you want to want to watch.

During pandemic at some point I started indiscriminately watching more YouTube while logged in, and do I regret it. It responded after my viewing habits changed. It seems possible to change it back gradually, but it takes some effort I wish I didn’t have to take.

Second-order volition (“want to want to”) plays a big role in allowing yourself to evolve, i.e. you can force yourself to do something until you become interested in it. In this sense recommendations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, an automatic labeling system that makes you behave the way it thinks you should behave, which is approximately how you behaved before (ideally; we set aside the issue of algorithmic manipulation).

This is true for any platform that has recommendations, and I am highly suspicious of the ones that don’t allow anonymous viewing.

Youtube: we see that you've accidentally clicked on one outrage video game video. Here's two weeks of your feed being flooded with Jordan Peterson dogshit and misogynist gamers

Youtube's recommendation algorithm is absolutely terrible.

EDIT: Also, Tiktok allows videos of up to ten minutes now, and still works well with that length.

1. In my experience, this is only true for blank accounts where algorithm doesn't have much to go by. Not the case for me.

2. If you don't want to register a video, you can remove it from your watch history, or you can watch it anonymously. What about TikTok?

3. I know TikTok has a 10 minute limit now, I meant 40 minutes and up. Where in the world do 10 minutes count as "long"?

1/ 10 year old account. Worse than ever

2/ you can dislike the video and tell it not to recommend it (unlike YouTube), and you can watch the videos on their website anonymously

3/ are you seriously watching 40+ minutes on your phone? They have two different goals, and that's fine.

> you can watch the videos on their website anonymously

And do you personally ever do that? How exactly? The crippled slow 'online viewer' that doesn't allow you to even do a simple search and blocks you with a login wall after a couple of minutes?

> are you seriously watching 40+ minutes on your phone? They have two different goals, and that's fine.

Yes, why not? An informative hands-on engineering workshop or an interview with a screenwriter easily run hours. If you will say 'TikTok is not designed for that', well that's my point, YouTube has equally great recommendation system and is designed for that equally as well as it's designed for 30-second cute animal videos.

> 10 year old account

Sorry to hear that YouTube is broken for you. I just can't imagine using TikTok for anything informative, like TFA suggests, when something like YouTube exists.

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