Not true. Why do IG reels and YouTube shorts suck, then?
They clearly built something superior. And it can't seem to be matched by the biggest tech companies.
They clearly built something superior. And it can't seem to be matched by the biggest tech companies.
It’s not just “did you click the like button”. It’s “did you swipe it away? How long did you watch until you swiped it away? Did you come back afterwards? Did you let it loop multiple times before moving on?”.
They’ll capture likes and dislikes you yourself probably didn’t even knew you had, just from tens and hundreds of these micro actions. And they’ll do it in the very first hour of you using the app, whereas YouTube won’t know too much about you even after months of you using it.
I haven't worked on sites as big as YouTube but on sites with 100,000 members who are very much engaged with one "game" you usually find they are mainly indifferent when you offer them another "game" to play.
I like YouTube for what it is. I have interacted very little with shorts but Google has scarily seen into my imagination. I don't want to go into that rabbit hole.
Two populations can be similar in terms of conventional demographics such as age, gender, race, what kind of clothes they wear, etc. but be different in their behavior. IG users are "players of the Instagram game" and TikTok are "players of the TikTok game" and a whole system of values and behaviors are involved.
To take an example playing the "engagement farming" game on Bluesky I can follow people and know some fraction of people will follow me back, but who do I want to follow?
I postulated that the people I want are people who will repost my photos so I can try following people who repost photos but I find that reposters are not "followers" whereas I get a much better response rate if I follow people who follow another social media photographer since those people are "followers". People have an online behavior signature like that which for me matters more than the color of your skin.
It has nothing to do with the quality of the algorithm. In fact the YT algorithm has gotten worse since they introduced shorts because they shove shorts into people's faces.
A better question would be why is the regular YouTube algorithm so bad. And the answer is because it doesn't optimize at all for the consumers, but for the producers (producers of ads, that is). TT has figured out it doesn't matter what people consume as long as they consume, whereas YT is bullish into controlling what people consume.
Tiktok was allowed to establish its own brand and develop a community while shorts and reels are intrinsically tied to their past. They may be able to escape that history but I don't think it's helping them be fast movers or win "cool" points.
My intuition would work the other way around. I'd expect offerings from more established companies to have a big leg up in terms of usable data. Youtube should be able to use a viewer's entire watch/subscription history to inform itself about what shorts a user might like, even before they've interacted with their first short. Bytedance, on the other hand, has to start from scratch with each truly new user.
The coolness or stodginess of the company would be secondary to its effects. If boring-old-Youtube could promise shorts creators great exposure to an enthusiastic audience, it would win the platform regardless of its brand.
https://www.threads.net/@mikeynerd/post/DB7DS7LzsVU
TikTok gets a definite thumbs up or thumbs down for every video it shows you whereas if you click on one particular sidebar video YouTube can make no conclusion about how you felt about the other videos in the sidebar. The recommendation literature talks about "negative sampling" to overcome this, I never could really believe in it, I think now it doesn't really work.
I built a system like that and found that, paradoxically, you have to make it blend in a good amount of content that it doesn't think you'd like for it to be able to calibrate itself.
Just a guess, as someone who makes their living from YouTube: YouTube creators are driven to create content that earns them money. As compared to long-form content, YouTube shorts earn next-to-nothing, and it’s not clear that they drive significant new traffic to more-valuable content.
Most large creators on YouTube are focused on the bottom line, not exposure.
Their algorithm is really built around their features. Specifically, temporal representations of user interest:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9458799/
The features used by their algorithm tells you what a user is interested, historically.
Contrast this to Meta, which uses the social graph as their features. Imagine features like the number of times a user likes another author's / cluster's content.
Tiktok will serve you $TOPIC because you have $INTERACTED with $TOPIC historically.
Meta will serve you $TOPIC because you have $INTERACTED with $PEOPLE who post $TOPIC, historically.
Meta only coincidentally gives you what you like.
Tiktok knows what you like.
This is the difference. This is why IG is losing.