Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

Recently, TikTok described its recommendation system in a blog post on its official website.

TikTok is a creative short video app which occupies people's leisure time and is easy to be addicted. One of the most important reasons is due to TikTok's recommendation system, which always meets people’s specific interests.

Users can always find the short videos they are interested in when landing in the For You feed. What's more amazing is that the content of TikTok on different users' mobile phones varies greatly. The For You feed that on everyone’s mobile phone is customized for specific individuals.

According to TikTok, the system suggest content after taking into account user preferences as expressed through interactions with the app, like posting a comment or following an account. If a user pays attention to the account or likes and comments on the video only related to pets, TikTok will undoubtedly provide them with more pet themed content. These signals help the recommendation system gauge the content people like as well as the content they'd prefer to skip.

Recommendations are based on a number of factors, including things like: user interactions such as the videos you like or share, accounts you follow, comments you post, and content you create; detailed video information such as captions, sounds, and hashtags; device and account settings such as language preference, country setting, and device type. The weights of these interactions are also different in the recommendation system. Compared with other data points, user interactions receive higher weight since they actively express these as preferences.

One of the inherent challenges with recommendation engines is that they can inadvertently limit your experience – what is sometimes referred to as a "filter bubble." By optimizing for personalization and relevance, there is a risk of presenting an increasingly homogenous stream of videos. This is a concern TikTok take seriously as they maintain their recommendation system. To keep people’s For You feed interesting and varied, the recommendation system works to intersperse diverse types of content along with those they already know they love. By offering different videos from time to time, the system is also able to get a better sense of what's popular among a wider range of audiences to help provide other TikTok users a great experience, too.

If interested, you can find more detailed introduction on TikTok’s recommender system in their official blog.

TikTok

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