>>Can I settle in on Tik Tok and spend an hour gaining a deep understanding of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Unironically, yes, I'd bet dollars to donuts there's some niche creator doing exactly this. As an example, one of the people I follow (@maklelan) is a PhD in theology & religion, and has ~1000 videos on biblical scholarship, the history of various religious texts, different translations/interpretations of scripture, etc.

It's interesting and very niche content. There are probably 1000x more views being had by attractive young women dancing, but TikTok is big enough that it has everything.

Fair enough. I thought I'd test it. I opened Tik Tok for pretty much the first time. I've installed it but not yet used it. It showed me a bunch of girls dancing, as expected. I thought I could swipe up / down to tell them what I like, but I can only swipe up, so I'm not sure how I train it.

I searched "Israel Palestine". I got an Irish guy named Freddy Quinne telling me it's like "coming home from work one day, only to find that someone else is now in your house". It appears to be mostly just guys talking / ranting. This hasn't really changed my mind that the medium shapes the content.

Oh, it's absolutely not easy finding that niche content. You're going to need to swipe past a lot of cleavage to find anything else. To get more of whatever you're currently on, re-watching, liking, commenting all probably work. To get less, either swipe past quickly or long press (I think?) and you can choose "not interested" or something. I think there are other ways to block particular creators and sounds (and maybe filters?) if you don't want to see that specific thing.

The search does leave something to be desired - the app is very much designed for just endless scrolling.

It just sounds like a lot of work trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Point taken that the content (maybe) exists on the platform, but if I can't find it what good is it? As essentially a worldwide daily competition for virality, it seems like it'll trend to what is mass entertainment.

Yah, if you're looking for particular content or something it's not a great app. It's really meant to be a maximally configurable timewaster. The app doesn't care if you waste an hour on dancing videos or slime videos or politics videos, as long as you spend it on the app.

I don't think things go viral on it quite the way they do on other platforms - like on youtube, to a certain degree, anything viral enough is going to show up in the recommendations for everyone. Less so on TikTok, I think.