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Comment by robinsonb5 | Hacker News Reader

I do have some admiration for the algorithm - but I also wish that refreshing the home page would show me some more of the many thousands of videos that I'd likely find interesting, rather than the same 20 just in a different order.

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I'm glad that the home page is semi-stable because I'll often click on a video and then go back and want to queue up another that looked interesting but if it were gone it might be hard to find again. (Yes there are strategies to work around this but I don't always use them).

They do have the "New to You" category on the home page now which you might find useful.

The should have a page with "recently shown on home page" like the history page for actually shown videos.

i had this happen to me. ive lost videos I wanted to see when i clicked one instead of another.

That's what watch later is for though.

I keep getting recommended the same damn set to videos which I've passed over a hundred times. Not sure why the "algorithm" is getting so much love, it's got some attributes that are pretty clearly crap.

I use watch later for completing videos, but these are just I think may be interesting from the homepage, like seeing the title and background pic. I sometimes open multiple tabs for them.

One of things I found the coolest, was when I am watching a video, and if the video mentions for example some event that happened a while ago or a person being referenced, I would immediately search for that, and I would see it already recommended on the search bar.

Maybe lots of others have also done the same, and it recorded that as a meaningful suggestion. Or maybe it's standard ML techniques, or the new Transformer models diffused across Googles products I'm not sure but was noticing this even around 3 years ago.

I wish though it would surface videos in my watch later in the recommendations page. As it is "watch later" is where videos go to get forgotten about.

Mine does? I often see videos from my watch later on the homepage. If you hover on them they say, "from your watch later list". It does only seem to be recently added ones though.

also being new to TikTok, I didn't realize scrolling up at first would refresh the queue of videos. And I would lose the vid being watched which was a bit terrifying to lose an interesting video.

It's discoverable at least and I can look past it given tiktok does a bunch of other stuff so much better than it's competitors. What's a lot less forgivable is how undiscoverable your actual watch history is in case you do want to go back to that one vid. Litterally have to search for * or the like.

It's very well hidden, but if you scroll to the end of the filter tags there's a button to show "New For You", which shows a screen full of new recommendations each time you refresh. Sometimes I'll roll the dice a few times with that page and find really interesting stuff.

This is great. Thanks for the tip. I'm a YouTuber and didn't even know about this.

That is not what I want. There should be an explicit button to refresh the recommendations. What I hate is a recommendation page that displayed what I liked but made them disappear just because I temporarily navigated away.

I think I'd be anxious then that if I saw two videos that I really wanted to watch I'd have to one in a background tabs, rather than just trust that the other one will almost certainly be recommended again.

i cannot echo this sentiment strongly enough

how the algo can be so good, and so bad, at the same time boggles my mind

the repetition just feels so unnecessary in many cases -- I know there's so much more content out there that is not a huge leap from what I watch regularly but the recommendation engine makes it broadly inaccessible

one related symptom of this - i think - is when you watch one or two videos on one new thing and then get drowned in videos about that thing at the expense of everything else

If you get swamped like this it's a good idea to switch to your Subscriptions list instead and watch some of the things you want to remind it you like.

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