Eugene Wei

I think it's about knowing what people are interested in and having an algorithm that can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things.

Eugene Wei's article [0] helped me see how TikTok uses more of an interest graph, whereas many of the other platforms use more social graphs. By this, I think he means that TikTok cares much more about knowing what people are interested in than knowing to whom they're connected.

> But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?

I think the fear is that the algorithm can be tweaked to nudge people towards things that the platform, or in this case, the CCP, want them to want.

For example, if I see you watching videos about the book 1984, and I want you to be less interested in things that promote fear of a totalitarian government, and I also know that you feel really afraid of your home getting robbed, I can have the algorithm show you more videos about homes getting robbed so that you boost your feelings of fear of neighbors and therefore you may even want to have…

This is exactly how my hobby project works: https://linklonk.com

The interest graph is built in response to your content upvotes/downvotes. The connections are float values instead of booleans. Here is how these float values are updated:

1. You start off weakly connected to all users and you see generally popular content.

2. When you upvote something - you get stronger connected to other users that upvoted that content before you (you don't connect to those who upvoted after you - this is a proof of work that Eugene wrote in https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service). The stronger your are connected to someone => the more weight their other upvoted items have for you => the higher their other upvoted items show up in your feed.

3. When you downvote - your connection to those who upvoted that content goes weaker. And your connection to those who also downvoted it goes higher.

4. Every time someone you are connected to upvotes something, your connection becomes slightly weaker to them. They sort of place a bet that this item is worth your attention and that bet is lost if you ignore that item. So if you ignore those who no longer post useful content or simply post too frequently for you - they will gradually disappear from your list. This prevents the old money problem from the same "Status as a Service" post above.

5. You can put the items you upvote into user-defined collections, so your tech content could go into your "tech" collection and users…

People who chant RSS seem to never get this. Publishing is trivial, search and discovery is all that matters, saying “pick your own service (separately) for discovery” is like saying write down int main(), now write down the rest of the program and you’re done. What the hell is that service? That’s 99% of the work.

In addition, only discovering feeds (followed by chronological aggregation of said feeds) is crude and outdated. Anyone who has subscribed to hundreds of feeds can probably tell you how great the signal to noise ratio is. It’s not. And that’s just for subscribing to blogs that tend to be on topic, throw in microblogs (Twitter and clones) and you quickly get all kinds of nonsense you don’t care about, e.g. baseball and politics if you follow John Gruber for Apple news. Realistically there are a small handful of really high quality feeds you don’t want to miss, and for the rest you want to follow topics, not people. TikTok lets you effortlessly do that; traditional RSS subscription model doesn’t, and no one has built that “your own service for discovery”. Ironically Reddit may be the closest thing for the following topics part, if you ignore all its problems.

There was an article on HN a couple years ago that goes into more details: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat

Quoting from the excellent blog post[1] submitted here yesterday[0] that stole my morning workout time:

"
Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps.
"

Let's see if they're forced to make any "hard decisions" about their bundled UX in future...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676

[1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat