Part of me wonders though if TikTok is helpful in understanding recommendation algorithms and curation, because it’s so blatant. I notice that, especially with younger users, there’s a total understanding that what they’re seeing is not occurring naturally, but is the result of computational choices being made for them.

YouTube is less surprising than its peers, especially TikTok. While the latter has an almost telepathic capacity for serving you a wide variety of content it thinks you’ll like, YouTube is instead a platform designed for long-term buy-in. Creators are less likely to go viral on a one-off video on YouTube than they are on TikTok, but they’re more... See more