I've put Tik Tok on my phone three different times now and used it each time over a few days and it seemed like I was scrolling endlessly and finding nothing.

YouTube's recommendations are terrible, but I usually open YouTube when I'm looking for something specific and it's amazing in that regard.

Instagram is somewhere in the middle. I mostly follow people I actually know so the videos are interesting because of that.

Are you "liking" videos? That's how I steered it in the right direction because it wasn't doing much for me when I first started using it. It only took a few minutes for it to latch onto my interest and then the watch time took over.

I only ever find something interesting on tiktok by searching for it. I can only watch the people i follow, the "FYP" has totally irrelevant stuff. I too have been trying to like and follow to get it to perform this magic people talk about but the "FYP" doesn't show me stuff I'd like to see like what I intentionally like and follow from searches.

I tried TikTok and it was awful. I didn’t find a single interesting video. I haven’t tried it since. I’m curious what people actually watch on there?

It seems to have just about everything. I use it mostly for bodybuilding, foreign language lessons, and music. FWIW it's known for the short-form stuff, but it also has plenty of long-form content as well.