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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

I don't use TikTok, but my understanding is that they are just a lot better than anyone else with the algorithm. Somehow where Meta built a social graph, TikTok built a graph of videos (no need to know who you are, they can just suggest videos based on other videos you watch). And it's apparently difficult to catch up (presumably because they have more users so more data to make better predictions).

That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not something else.

As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps? Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.

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I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.

Of course an app you have used for thousands of hours is going to know you better than the one you tried for half an hour

Try it. I've been using Youtube for a decade and its recommendations are a total crapshoot these days. TikTok figured out my preferences within 15 minutes just based on which videos I liked and watched, and it can change course extremely quickly if you get bored of a certain topic.

The total number of hours I spent Youtube must outnumber the total number of hours I spent on TikTok by at least 100:1.

For me the normal video recommendations are awesome on Youtube, I regularly find very obscure super interesting stuff in my recommendations.

For shorts it is abysmal, I only get horrible recommendations there - no idea why it is so different.

That's interesting. YouTube's gotten me fairly pinned algorithm-wise over the past few years (I used to never use recommendations at all before that). But my Shorts recommendations seem to just be the regular recommendations, but Shorts versions of them. Sometimes as far as the same channels, or the same people in clips even if it's on a different channel.

I think youtube is deliberately not showing good recommendations to boost ad revenue

> I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.

I've watched probably 1000s of hours of youtube and it's still pushing crap at me that I would never watch in a million years (edit: eg "How to create Smart Contracts using ChatGPT" or "Abusive tough guy picks fight w the WRONG GUY!"). Maybe it's better if you like a specific genre of video essays or whatever but in terms of a replacement for tiktok it's completely irrelevant.

Reels is at least in the conversation, but the UX is ass and the culture there is a dumpster fire. Granted, I haven't had a meta account for about a decade (the ad obsession just destroys the experience) so this is all hearsay.

Reels is just as bad as you remember, both in content and in presentation (the app is a dumpster fire).

Then be prepared to be surprised? I don't know why its better but it actually is night and day different. The best uneducated way I can describe it is YouTube sticks you into a model that only classifies people in large groups. Oh you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads. TikTok has a model that is tailored just for you. Oh you like video game streamers that play Tarkov? Here are some videos of other games similar to Tarkov.

> you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads

This is something that infuriates me about youtube, to the extent that I wonder if it's deliberate. Those guys feel like the propaganda the platform wants to sell me, whereas on the Chinese platforms there isn't the sense of HERE IS THE TWO MINUTE HATE PROPAGANDA VIDEO CITIZEN you sometimes get on other platforms.

I wonder if its simply just a pattern over the last N years with Google where they maximize everything for ad revenue. I honestly don't know how TikToks ad revenue looks like but from a consumer point of view it appears for whatever reason they have mostly corporate ads where YouTube has the lowest value garbage (perhaps highest paying) ads on MLM and getting rich through real estate.

Edit: As a weak comparison I think about Prime Streaming vs YouTube or Hulu. Ignoring that ads suck. Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it. YouTube throws whatever highest paying garbage at you as much as possible. I tried Hulu once with ads, painful, every like 7mins you are getting an ad and often the same ad over and over.

It's also worth noting that TikTok has the "TikTok Shop" that allows people to sell directly through the app. Perhaps this allows them to rely less heavily on advertising. I certainly see virtually zero ads on the app. Ideally this is because they've identified that I'm a terrible person to sell ads to, but perhaps they're just less aggressive about pushing them.

> Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it.

Sure, I just stopped using prime when they introduced ads. It's also the number one complaint about the service and it regularly shows up any time the service is mentioned. I also can't remember a single ad played that was actually relevant to me.

Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.

> Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.

I feel like Hulu established early enough that they were partially (or fully) ad-supported. I watched a show for free on Hulu with ads many years before I ever would have considered paying for a streaming service at all. Prime, on the other hand, is something people already pay for (usually for reasons other than just streaming, but that also reinforces that they're paying), so the ads probably come off as worse because of that, even though it's kind of backwards in some ways.

Yea, I commented[1] on this exact observation yesterday, right down to the two topics. It's absurd what gets highlighted as "suggestions."

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42699541

Reminder that YT used to be pretty decent about (music) recommendations until, I’d say, 2015-ish, that’s how I discovered lots and lots of very cool and interesting (music) stuff that I listen to this day.

Not sure how they managed to screw that up, but screw it they did, and nowadays the sidebar, or even the plain search, has become unusable.

As others said, you should try it. I did, and I was impressed how quickly it gets me to lose a lot of time.

I've put Tik Tok on my phone three different times now and used it each time over a few days and it seemed like I was scrolling endlessly and finding nothing.

YouTube's recommendations are terrible, but I usually open YouTube when I'm looking for something specific and it's amazing in that regard.

Instagram is somewhere in the middle. I mostly follow people I actually know so the videos are interesting because of that.

Are you "liking" videos? That's how I steered it in the right direction because it wasn't doing much for me when I first started using it. It only took a few minutes for it to latch onto my interest and then the watch time took over.

I only ever find something interesting on tiktok by searching for it. I can only watch the people i follow, the "FYP" has totally irrelevant stuff. I too have been trying to like and follow to get it to perform this magic people talk about but the "FYP" doesn't show me stuff I'd like to see like what I intentionally like and follow from searches.

I tried TikTok and it was awful. I didn’t find a single interesting video. I haven’t tried it since. I’m curious what people actually watch on there?

It seems to have just about everything. I use it mostly for bodybuilding, foreign language lessons, and music. FWIW it's known for the short-form stuff, but it also has plenty of long-form content as well.

> not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes

Well, and what about the actual content? If all you have is a bunch of garbage it doesn't matter how good your algorithm is if all it can do is find the best garbage to push at the user.

When I tried TikTok for the first time in 2020, it had my preferences dialed in within about 15 minutes.

I tried reels when it first released, and gave up after an hour of constantly being shown videos of scantily clad women.

Any video platform is engaged in a constant war against being the OnlyFans sales funnel. Mind you, this also has a false positives ban problem.

it absolutely is, i routinely do a vanilla algo run on reels vs tiktok to compare and it’s crazy how much better it is.

reels is really, really bad - it is surprisingly hard to get it to stop showing you some combination of “funny prank videos” and onlyfans funnel content.

I suspect that the algorithm is taking in inputs that maybe we don’t consider. Not just swipes or likes, but maybe even how still the phone is while you watch it or if you blink less, signs you’re more focused on the video. Maybe they don’t have access to that telemetry but I think that’s kind of the vein of how they measure attention more than just touchscreen actions

Also, Tiktok don't even require you to be a user to use, exactly because it's kinda irrelevant for them. They will build the algo based on which videos you liked, for how many seconds, replays, etc etc.

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