The lack of up/downvote is what destroys their signal, I think. They do it to themselves

? Do you have any proof things aren't working out for TikToks algorithm besides a few people whining on HN who probably weren't the target market in the first place? Because they seem to be doing just fine.

GP didn't say anything about TikTok's algorithm not working out for people in general, but I'll bite.

The selling point behind TikTok is that by using the app normally (i.e. watching what you want) TikTok can figure out what stuff you want to watch.

But pretty much every suggestion that comes out on HN for people who complain about the algorithm on sites like this is to do unnatural things to "train" the algorithm: be very careful about how long you watch videos, click on videos that you think are relevant even if you don't want to watch them, watch things you're not interested in to prevent falling into a rut, avoid click on things you're curious about if you don't think you want to watch 100s of them to avoid tainting your recommendations, etc.

If that's "working" I think I'd agree that TikTok was mostly hype.

Yep. It's almost like tiktok targets users who are only using system 1. If you just go with lizard brain reactions you don't care about any of that. But once system 2 is in play you start doing "crazy" things like watch a video forensically even if you don't want to be fed similar videos on the regular or skip videos even if they are about things you like, you need more control over what you watch

A good example here is YouTube, which started recommending me a bunch of really short (5-second) meme videos lately which I really don’t want polluting my feed. Even if I really want to click and watch them just out of dumb curiousity… (I don’t go to youtube for 5 second meme videos, I prefer longer form content.)

I spent some time disliking every 5-second video being recommended to me, and the problem went away. It was easy.

YouTube also allows to remove videos from watch history completely, though I don't know how fast (or if ever) this has effect on recommendations...

Would such proof be available?

I'm another one who's tried TikTok on a number of occasions and it's always failed badly with me, worse than any other site I can think of. It never improved despite people telling me it eventually would.

My impression is that it was making too many assumptions about me based on the wrong signals or something.

But to your point: wouldn't there be a survival bias of sorts with assessing recommendation performance? I didn't like it and left, so presumably the people who remained liked it.

It's obviously popular so there's that, but it seems circular to say it's working for the people who like it and stay. You're losing information about opportunity costs of lost users.

I mean there is an upvote/downvote in that there's a like button and a not interested button. If tiktok shows you something you really don't like just long press on the screen and hit "not interested"

They used to have options for like "don't show me videos with this sound" or "don't show me videos from this user" but now it's just a general purpose button.

>The lack of up/downvote is what destroys their signal, I think.

They don't need up/downvotes. They have signals such as liking, sharing, watching multiple times, commenting, looking at comments, saving, skipping, looking at creators account and other videos by the creator. If you want to focus on up and downvotes, you end up with reddit.