What Makes TikTok's Algorithms So Effective?(thenewstack.io)
thenewstack.io
What Makes TikTok's Algorithms So Effective?
https://thenewstack.io/what-makes-tiktoks-algorithms-so-effective/
4 comments
I've always suspected that the secret sauce was that there are plenty of humans in the loop tagging and classifying, that's a cheap option in China. It's from a censorship regime after all. Today they likely have enough data to automate most of it.
Babawomba(1)
I read many papers on "negative sampling" which is used in western recommender algorithms to guess at what you didn't like because there's no dislike button: I always thought "I can't believe it works" and fact is, it doesn't or it doesn't work very well.
My RSS reader gets a thumbs up/thumbs down and gets AU-ROC of 0.79, TikTok gets 0.84 or so and has a lot more data and 1000x the budget.
I'd almost say "throw the western recommendation literature in the trash and treat it as a classification problem [3]" except that when you have less than <1000 data points for a user there is a cold start problem. You could throw AI and the computational power of a Dyson sphere at the problem and it won't do as much as a dislike button that speaks with authority.
[1] https://montevallotimetravel.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/idiocr...
[2] would be good for people who don't like hysterical posts about politics but it's an existential threat to the advertising economy, influencers, etc...
[3] calibrated, even