They clearly built something superior. And it can't seem to be matched by the biggest tech companies.
It has nothing to do with the quality of the algorithm. In fact the YT algorithm has gotten worse since they introduced shorts because they shove shorts into people's faces.
A better question would be why is the regular YouTube algorithm so bad. And the answer is because it doesn't optimize at all for the consumers, but for the producers (producers of ads, that is). TT has figured out it doesn't matter what people consume as long as they consume, whereas YT is bullish into controlling what people consume.
Tiktok was allowed to establish its own brand and develop a community while shorts and reels are intrinsically tied to their past. They may be able to escape that history but I don't think it's helping them be fast movers or win "cool" points.
Then again, perhaps this is the algorithm's way of scaring me away to save precious bandwidth, knowing full well that I will never buy products from online ads anyway?
Don't forget Friendster!
Mainly bad-luck in being too early or too late, though MySpace had some self-inflicted problems with performance and overcomplicating the interface (by allowing customization).
Instead, it is likely a component that powers ByteDance's commercial recommender system solution, which they market to e-commerce companies: https://www.byteplus.com/en/product/recommend
This was mentioned in past discussions of the paper on HN.
And even if aspects of this are used for TikTok: (a) it would be just one of many components of their recommendation system, and (b) the TikTok recommendation system has changed a lot during the 2+ years since this has been published.
So take what you see here with a grain of salt. After reading the paper and the code, you will NOT know how TikTok's recommendations work.
Releasing the recommender on Github is a way to try to diffuse that criticism. But it's just one part of the puzzle that is Tiktok's content distribution.
Of course, when the conversation is about TikTok, this often becomes accusations of propaganda.
But YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter all exert significant control over their algorithms and things like their Homepage, Trending Topics, etc. The conservative right often labels such curation as liberal propaganda.
Is this just your belief or is there evidence you can point to.
How would you differentiate manual intervention from algorithmic intervention?
1. It doesn't even claim to be that.
2. It's over a year old - so even if it was, this is no longer it.
3. There's zero incentive for them to release it, but every incentive to release a fake one.
4. TikTok is too much of a national asset, I doubt the Chinese government would not use it to their advantage (and transparency would be counter to that).
Edit: there's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471278
will be far more interesting to know say what is the difference, what got changed/removed to make them feel comfortable that such an open source variant won't get them into troubles with some 3-letters-acronym agencies back home.
