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Comment by spondylosaurus | Hacker News Reader

I don't use TikTok myself, but I'm curious how text posts will be prioritized in people's feeds compared to standard video posts.

My understanding is that (at least on paper) there's a minor feedback loop where getting a lot of views on a video = video is recommended to more people = more engagement = more recommendations. And conversely, if too many people scroll past a video without watching it, that video gets de-recommended in the same fashion.

So now we throw text posts into the mix. Even if a lot of these text posts have music attached, I'd imagine people on TikTok are way more likely to stop scrolling and watch a video than stop scrolling and read a 1000-character post; unless TikTok's content recommendations specifically account for this discrepancy, I could see text posts getting drowned out pretty fast.

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There are a lot of text posts already on TikTok, but they're just done as videos or slideshows. And some are very popular. Text memes or jokes or "witty observations" often are in this realm.

And it also turns out that these are shared quite often -- which is another metric that TikTok's algorithm uses.

Videos with lots of text hijack the algorithm a bit - it counts what proportion of the video is watched when evaluating its effectiveness, and if you put a giant wall of text on a 7-sec sound clip, you can get an artificially high watch-through rate with not-particularly-good content.

Text without images in the background seems objectively less attention grabbing, I wouldn't be surprised if most people just keep using captions over video.

Ive noticed this hijack before.

I have to purposefully skip by any text posts now because any interaction just fills my feed with the junk.

i think pausing subverts the metrics skew, but yeah, I mostly just skip because it usually isn't worth reading.

Is anything on TikTok worth consuming?

Yes, its a bit better than any american social media platform. There's still a ton of garbage, but a slightly higher proportion of good content.

Which platforms are TikTok better than? Because I can't think of any. It's junk food for the brain, and I've heard even teenagers tell me that themselves. I think in the future TikTok will be looked back at not unlike the tobacco industry in the 20th century.

Reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram.

You should actually try tiktok instead of regurgitating the opinions of sinophobic nationalists. The algorithm reflects yourself better than any other app, so whether you get junk is entirely up to what you choose to watch.

> Reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram.

Yea I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because I find your statement that TikTok is superior to each of these absurd and comical.

Why are you assuming I've never installed and tried TikTok?

The company is worth almost 100 Billion.

Maybe?

The heroin, crystal meth, opioids, and other destructive drugs' markets are also fairly large.

No. There is nothing of value on TikTok. People may say otherwise but they use TikTok so their intelligence is minimal.

The video algorithm is a lot more precise. If you spend ~3 seconds on 2 girl scout videos before swiping on, and less than 1 second on body building, you suddenly get a surge of girl scout videos like the whole app is sponsored by them. Someone else never noticed a single video in the subject. It feels magical that the app happens to have thousands of videos for your specific likes and none for content you don't like. I wouldn't be surprised if it went down to measuring your attention to a hundredth of a second

Saying all that, if you read 1000 characters, according to the TikTok way of sorting, you're already hooked. There will be plenty of posts where you swipe on after ~10 characters (in terms of swiping on within X hundreds of a second)

People who regularly use TikTok are used to the swipe up super quickly once a post doesnt interest you, it shouldn't be any different for measuring text

> People who regularly use TikTok are used to the swipe up super quickly once a post doesnt interest you, it shouldn't be any different for measuring text

I predict a lot of high-quality, well-researched text posts doing great on tiktok

Given how a significant, significant majority of content on TikTok is propaganda, misinformation, or disinformation, I see text posts doing as great as a wet fart in a hot tub.

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