TikTok turned this theory on its head. Its feed was driven not by who you knew but by what you watched. It didn’t ask you to build your social graph, one connection at a time. Instead, it used AI to create something entirely different: a behavior graph. Every swipe, pause, and replay would generate signals about a user’s interest in various types

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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.

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

5. Algorithmic feeds are failing: StumbleUpon helped me start to understand, almost at a humanistic level, how vast the internet could be. TikTok often yields a similar result, though with a key difference. On TikTok, almost all videos trend toward a kind of visual consistency and repeatability. Silly voices or bits of speech become ‘sounds’, to be... See more