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Comment by infecto

8 hours ago

Anecdotal to myself. I shamefully sometimes use TikTok, I particularly like recipe clips and even I noticed something in the last week, most noticeably around this weekend where the algorithm for recommendations changed. It’s like they completely wiped my preferences. I try not to watch anything political so I cannot say much about censorship of content but something was noticeable in the last week.

Same experience here, and also I noticed several channels I used to be following I was no longer following after the hand offs. The feed is completely different now.

Something definitely broke.

I noticed exactly the same thing. I don't recall which day it started (probably this past Sunday), but it was as if a switch flipped. My For You Page no longer has anything to do with my preferences. I'm familiar with Tiktok nudging me in different directions in the past, but I was always able to steer it back to videos I was interested in within 10-15 minutes. Three days later, and it's as if Tiktok not only has forgotten everything about my watch history, it also hasn't learned. That said, it doesn't seem to be entirely about politics. I had a mix of political/protest related content, native plant content, and woodworking videos on my For You Page. None of those are showing up for me.

  • Very similar for me as well. And yes no connection to the politics angle. It was very pronounced for me because I would like a video and then every other video it showed me was someone else’s version of it. It was very bizarre.

It does this all the time. I think it is called "exploration injection". It increases engagement by trying to prevent boredom.

  • It’s amazes how confident people will describe your lived experiences and say you are wrong. No this was entirely different and coincided in time with the complaints of censorship.

Have you been using it for long?

I no longer use TikTok, but I was pretty hooked for a while, and I felt those “waves” every now and then.

It was pretty noticeable because each time I started getting extreme right political content from my country, and I neither consume anything local nor right wing content.

  • Yes I have and this reset was very different than anything I have experienced. I would like a specific recipe and then they the feed would show me someone else’s attempt of that recipe. I haves used the app for years off and on.