How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou

Perhaps no use of AI is more visible to more people than TikTok’s For You Page. They have pioneered using AI to create incredible recommendations.

TikTok’s For You tab serves an endless stream of short videos that algorithmically adapt to your interests, sorting the content most likely to engage you. Using it feels like having your mind read, because all you do is watch or skip, focus or ignore, a decision made too fast to be fully conscious. Individual videos or accounts matter less than cat... See more

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all build their feeds from content shared by friends and followers. The pool of content their algorithms choose from is limited or scoped. TikTok’s feed however is built from content shared by any user, regardless if you know them or not.

When a creator posted a video, TikTok showed it to a sample audience and then expanded to bigger targeted audiences if it did well—a form of a recursive publishing feedback loop. Creators with no followers could still reap rewards for videos that were funny and understandable by anyone. This was uniquely powerful for the medium of short-form video,... See more

There have been hundreds of investigative reports, technical analysis, research whitepapers, statistical studies, PhD dissertations, and more about how TikTok’s secretive recommendation algorithm works. TikTok’s recommendation system is without a doubt incredibly complex and impressive, but so too are the recommenders that Facebook, Instagram, and ... See more

More than any other feed algorithm I can recall, Bytedance’s short video algorithm fulfilled these two requirements. It is a rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker. Merely by watching some videos, and without having to follow or friend anyone, you can quickly train TikTok on what you like. In the two sided entertainment network that is TikTok, the algor... See more

Facebook had a growth mantra of “7 friends in 10 days” that made the product sticky for new users, but TikTok doesn’t require any friends, followers, or even an account. The hyper-personalized algorithm recommends content based on thousands of objects and tags analyzed in each individual video, along with an individual user's view history, re-watch... See more

the most important piece of technology Bytedance introduced to TikTok: the updated For You Page feed algorithm.