Comment by bearjaws

what types of videos have made that have gone viral?

It's a proper Skinner box. Very well made. And in millions of people's pockets too.

  """ Within such a possible future system, the only command or need
  that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that
  I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the
  machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that
  would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs
  except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other
  command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just
  to just shut it down. Television is something like that now.

  I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that
  will take every command I give it except the one that I want the
  most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do
  anything else I say. I type in "food", and out comes food. I type in
  "I want to give this talk in Washington". It comes out.  But the one
  command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go "boom!",
  and all the little transistors just to go... """

  Rick Roderick 1990

the tiktok algo is genuinely impressive. What's cool is that the engineers published some works explaining how it functions.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663

It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.

same here. I found myself loosing an hour of just scrolling through short videos, most of them really good and ones that I liked. I had to delete the app because it was working too good.

Same reason I never touched prismatic after its first load.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://youtube.com/shorts/3FISFq_sCH8

The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated, but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me videos that she believed were genuine.

the TikTok reocmmendation engine seemed to work better with a sparse history and better understood user feedback about content that one wants to see or avoid

Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the feed though

YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me this or do not show me that and it is all based on duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff

so much for free market economics though stuck with two imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(

> the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.

Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.

I'm also reminded of this George Burns quote: "The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made."

I had cultivated a FYP that felt authentic to me, especially relative to everything else on the internet, but after a while it looked just as phony to my eyes, without any real change in the content itself. Just a different brand of phony.

Tiktok is serving you better things because

1) more people post there 2) you've used it much more and given them huge amounts of data on who you are and what your like to watch, when.

I can assure you those tiktok things are not the top of everyone's feed, sounds personalized. But your list for reels, and the other one sounds like the basic things they show to new people to try to figure out what they like, possibly somewhat curated by some past swipes.

Each of these are just algorithms. They get better the more you use them because your use = your data and personality and you've just used tiktok enough that they know _exactly_ what you like and who you are. Give it time, the others will come along if people use them

Have you considered that Reels is so bad precisely because you don’t use it?

Mine:

A bit from the SF Chronicle on the LA fires. A comedy/info bit by Alex Falcone. An Ad. A wrestling technique (I’m into judo and BJJ). A card trick. Cooking techniques. An ad.

It’s ad-heavy and frankly I don’t try to spend a lot of time on it. But as somebody who uses it at least some, I get absolutely zero of the kind of garbage you suggest.

I enjoy movies, even though they are staged.

Hm. I’m a grown man and I post reels to all the platforms. I like the tech and enjoy trying to emulate a professional process with prosumer equipment and practices (filming, editing, color grading, sound design, etc.).

After about 30 or so reels this year, I’ve got about 70 followers - half of which are definitely bots, a third are family/friends, and the rest seem to be real people.

My feed has a lot of people like me, and people whose content I think is at the quality I’d like to be at (mostly photographers, videographers, small but full-time YouTubers).

Maybe you’re just finding what you’re looking for.

My TikTok feed is full of very much adults and who own small businesses. I’ve seen some people in college, but there’s no kids in my feeds.

It's commensurate with how China treats foreign companies. Nobody can do serious business in China without the CCP's blessing, often involving a "partnership" with a local company.

Interpellation [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_(philosophy)

Go outside, everyone's real .. at least for the time being!

I genuinely have no idea what Zuckerberg is responsible for at Facebook other than hijacking credentials (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and stealing/copying ideas

Anyone with half a brain ought to have come up with a better system than Reels is

I would use the word 'fresh' for TikTok; like old school YouTube, there's quirkiness and variety.

Strange. Until about a month ago, my IG feed was almost all independent and amateur musicians, interesting tech makers (NOT reviewers or “influencers”, and some alt comedy. Suddenly, in the past 4 weeks, my feed is all political propaganda from the far right, ads, and more ads.

I deleted Instagram because of the change. I’m done. Never used TikTok, it seemed totally fake to me.

Exactly. Despite using TikTok since mid 2019, I recognized very few of the top 20 accounts.