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Comment by Ateoto | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty upset about it honestly. TikTok's algorithm has always done a fantastic job of providing interesting clips in a way that Facebook and Instagram has never been able to provide. I will say that upon a new account, it's mostly garbage, but it quickly learned what I was interested in and what I would tend to engage with. It also does this while showing me considerably fewer ads than the meta platforms.

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Seconded. My experiences were similar.

That said, the algorithm got noticeably worse after 2021. Maybe because of the TikTok shop. I’ve categorized around 3,000 clips into different collections (with 600+ being in “educational”) but that fell off over the last few years. I would be a lot more upset about the ban if they had maintained quality, but now I’m like well, whatever.

Serious question: Why is the back end learning of so many human habits not creepy to you? It was weaponized once with how they created armies of teenagers who called their local representatives and made threats.

They weaponized the backend to drive that by injecting in recommendations for that inorganically, or that was something that emerged from having a recommender system backend?

> It was weaponized once with how they created armies of teenagers who called their local representatives and made threats.

This is an extremely dramatic way of saying "they had a banner in the app which informed users of a policy that affected them and directed them to contact their representatives", something which plenty of other social media platforms, such as Reddit have done without controversy.

> Why is the back end learning of so many human habits not creepy to you?

In the context of banning TikTok for this particular reason, then X.com, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are all equally guilty in how they both boost and suppress different types of content based on interference from local government.

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