Summary
TikTok is an entertainment network that has become increasingly popular due to its algorithm. This algorithm acts as a matching mechanism, allowing users to find content that is tailored to their interests. The design of the algorithm helps it to work efficiently and effectively, allowing it to scale quickly. By understanding how the algorithm works, we can gain insight into how it sees the world and how it can be used to create a more personalized experience for users. Ultimately, this understanding can help us to better understand how algorithms shape our lives.
Top Highlights
- TikTok doesn’t have an explicit downvote button, but by serving you just one video at a time, they can infer your lack of interest in any single video based on whether you churn out of that video quickly A quick swipe up before a video has completed is like swiping left on Tinder. The best TikTokers have an intuitive sense of the narrative pace th...
- This, then, is the magic of the design of TikTok: it is a closed loop of feedback which inspires and enables the creation and viewing of videos on which its algorithm can be trained. For its algorithm to become as effective as it has, TikTok became its own source of training data.
- TikTok fascinates me because it is an example of a modern app whose design, whether by accident or, uhh, design, is optimized to feed its algorithm as much useful signal as possible. It is an exemplar of what I call algorithm-friendly design.
- But let’s step back even earlier, before you’re even watching the video, and understand how the TikTok algorithm “sees” the video itself. Before the video is even sent down to your phone by the FYP algorithm, some human on TikTok’s operations team has already watched the video and added lots of relevant tags or labels.
- how the design of TikTok helps its algorithm work as well as it does
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Thoughts & Comments
Malcolm Mason Rodriguez
There should be a TikTok for Thoughts. Glasp could be such a platform if shifted from the social graph to the interest graph. TikTok uses an algorithm friendly design as opposed to a user friendly design that in turn results in a better user experience. Some of the frictions it imposes on the user like paginated feed rather than scrolling feed allo...