I live in a big city and most of the feed is highly sexualised, highly political, or highly prank-related.

My friend that lives in a small town about 100 miles away has to essentially send me fun tiktok videos and, no matter how many likes I do of those videos, the base diet of sexual, political, or prank-related videos are always there.

I run into this daily. I'm in the military and so my internet connection at work is mingled with a thousand other military people. Ok, it is accurate to say we are predominantly male and younger, but every time I see an ad does it have to an an anime character? Some of us recently gathered to watch the DC riot footage on youtube. The footage started with a non-skippable ad for some pervy anime game. Try holding a strait face in front of the general as a busty cartoon character in a negligee is bouncing up and down on a ten-foot screen.

I personally use ublock to correct in real time my world lenses.

Classic! I love real world tidbits like this. I would suggest in the future use youtube-dl https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/index.html to download the video to your machine to avoid situations like this.

More anecdata: I also live in a big city - London - and I don't see this. I joined TikTok just a few weeks ago and I was surprised at how overwhelmingly positive and fun it all is.

I know for a fact that what's on my Discover feed (surrealist art, UX/UI stuff, Newfie dog videos) is unique to me.

That's a good point. I was wondering about the initial seed of the feed.

It wasn't my intention to shame though.

Until tiktok has something like channels or theme/tag subscription it will remain a problem.

Your point about what they like is irrelevant to that point.

So if OP is seeing "loads" of sexualized content, it's because they spent enough time watching sexualized content before swiping for TikTok to think that's what they want to see, and ensure they see more of it.

Even if the picture you are painting of the previous poster is accurate, being horny once in a while is by no means justification for an endless stream of sexualized content.

That's not a neutral quality of the system, but a deliberate feedback loop establishing an addictive behavior. We already know the shortcomings of the human condition and should ask for less footguns, not more.

We can never be sure of anything. What if HN start pushing train death videos on the front page and the admin can't tweak the algo because a glitch in the stack prevent them from accessing the backend ?

This sounds very much like victim-blaming, I don't think it's appropriate to side with TikTok on this.

I almost always see content that is only fun.

That has made it much better for long-term engagement and positive for my mental health, rather than other social media's short-term outrage engagement that is wholly negative.

It could mean the algorithm designers have decided that optimising for fun is more effective at increasing engagement than optimising for shock value and conflict.

But, this is a different choice than other social media designers have made. It seems like there is some more wholesome motivation.

I experience this with politics videos on YouTube. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that. One evening I'll watch a few politics videos. The next day, my recommendations are filled with politics. Over time my recommendations get back to normal. Then I'm struck with the politics bug again, but my recommendations don't give me an easy way to find more politics content. They're recommending the type of stuff I'd normally watch. The day after that I'm annoyed again about politics being all over my recommended lists.

It feels like I should have separate profiles based on the topics I'm interested in. The platforms don't seem to really support that though. Even different users seem to influence each others suggestions.

It's like putting a lot of chocolate with sugar in my apartment: the wise choice is to not even buy anything that contains sugar, as I can't stop myself from eating it if it's in front of me all the time.

And for the record I consider a lot of tiktok pranks to be borderline psycho (eg gaslighting your SO for giggles about divorce, abortion, etc.).