Comment by PaulHoule

Well...

Personally I can't stand TikTok or Youtube Shorts or the videos on Instagram. I just can't stand the meaningless motion to get attention, it makes my skin crawl, it makes the bottom drop out of my stomach, etc. One time YT Shorts showed me an AI generation video of a pretty girl transforming into a fox on America's got talent, which is a good choice for me but then I got saturation videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about everything on AGT with the same music and reaction shots and it was more than I could use and not looking cool anymore but rather like AI slop. That said, I enjoy classic YouTube with relish.

My RSS reader gives recommendations based on explicit up/down and it has an AUC of maybe 0.78 or so, I saw a paper where TikTok is getting 0.83 so I feel like I'm doing OK.

I haven't done anything to change it in the last year except increase the number of random articles it inserts a little because making the recs worse actually can make them better, see [1] TikTok is famous for doing this. I think I could tune it up so for a given batch it could have a target "thumbs up" percentage or something more systematic but really I am very happy with the recs so it is not clear to me what "better" really is.

There is the problem with it that the system has a lot of latency which does not really matter for articles on most subjects because news about software or science or political science or engineering is usually OK if it is delayed a few days or a few weeks but it is a problem with sports where you really look like a dumbass if you post about something that happened on week 2 during week 4. It's a toughie though because I'd have to rework the thing to take out latency in 5+ stages of the system and then think systematically how to balance "urgent" vs "interesting" so I don't face the problem that urgent but interesting sports articles don't crowd other things out. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

[2] personally I don't mind the old articles for myself because I'm a weird kind of sports fan. Two years ago I used to follow the NFL but since I started doing sports photography I might go to 5 games on one weekend and if I am doing that the NFL is a lot less interesting than, say, Arknights so I am a little embarrassed to say I have no idea how the Bills are doing this year. But if I'm going to post sports articles to Bluesky or something it's a problem.