"No one is harder on a talented person than the person themselves" - Linda Wilkinson ; "Trust your guts and don't follow the herd" ; "Validate direction not destination" ;

January 11, 2023

Tiktok Algo Analysis

Ref  - Real-time Short Video Recommendation on Mobile Devices

  • Generally models the ranking problem as a regression (e.g., predict user’s rating of a video)
  • Classification (e.g., predict whether the user will like a video) task
  • Pair-wise ranking uses pair-wise loss functions to learn the semantic distance of a pair of items. Distance between embeddings
  • model personalization by combining local data set of each user and similar samples retrieved from cloud to train ranking model on device
  • Client maintains a watched video list, and all the features and user feedback of each video in the list will be collected and stored. Every time a video is consumed, it will be appended to the list, so we can extract real-time signals from this list with almost no latency

Ref - Link

User Features

  • Which accounts you follow
  • Creators you’ve hidden
  • Comments you’ve posted
  • Videos you’ve liked or shared on the app
  • Videos you’ve added to your favorites
  • Videos you’ve marked as “Not Interested”
  • Videos you’ve reported as inappropriate
  • Longer videos you watch all the way to the end (aka video completion rate)
  • Content you create on your own account
  • Interests you’ve expressed by interacting with organic content and ads

Signals from content

  • Captions
  • Sounds
  • Hashtags*
  • Effects
  • Trending topics

Info collected from device

TikTok’s data processing practices

In total, to reach a FYP stream that recommended one questionable video

out of every four videos, it took: 

  • An estimated 4 hours and 41 min, Viewing 650 videos in total (41 in the Search stream, 609 in the FYP stream)
  • Making 200 likes ظ Liking 25 videos in the search stream (For clarity, these are excluded from the harms tally)
  • Liking 175 videos in the FYP stream (of which 146 were questionable videos and 29 were borderline)
  • Making four searches for problematic hashtags
  • Swiping to ‘skip’ 352 videos before they were finished (an indication to the algorithm that you are not interested in this content).

Keep Exploring!!!

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