Eugene Wei

This is a great writeup of some of the story behind the Tiktok algorithm - https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat

A fantastic essay by Eugene Wei on how TikTok’s tool set makes this possible: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/2/15/american-idle

This feels like both an anecdote and a straw man. I can point to two blogs on either side that have a lot to offer. Large bundle: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/ Small Bundle: https://www.eugenewei.com/

Hmmm, so far it sounds like a kitchen sink with too much going on and yet not enough to differentiate from others to attract users. I would highly recommend reading this: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

I'll start by saying social is extremely exciting to do. I also agree there is a need for a FB alternative. But before you start, I'd highly recommend (can't stress it enough) reading this: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service. It's the best read I found on social. I wish we had read it before trying to compete TikTok :)

There is a related anecdote in "The Sports Gene" that suggests that MLB hitters do not track the ball in flight, but instead react to the pitchers' arm motion. As a result they have trouble hitting a motion they haven't visually trained against: http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2013/8/23/the-pitchers-who-conquered-mlb…

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 In addition, only discovering feeds (followed by chronological aggregation of said feeds) is crude and outdated.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

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…

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

There's an RSS feed in the source code: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog?format=rss

I think you might find this helpful: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

Status-as-a-service https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

Social media is changing, but not dead. Maybe the idea of what we “want” social media to be, is dead. There will always be a demand for social status. And, as long as there is sufficient demand, there will be supply. Eugene Wei[1] has written a lot about how online social media operates in the economy of social status. It applies to TikTok and LinkedIn alike. [1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

Here's an article discussing this at length: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/9/18/seeing-like-an-algorithm

Anyone interested building a social network should read: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service tl;dr - There is a specific reason that we like to use social networks, and it's the receiving of status or accumulate capital. From this theory, a network like Slow Social cannot succeed because there isn't enough social capital that can be consumed.

This article suggests that the “one video at a time” format makes attention metrics much more reliable: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/9/18/seeing-like-an-algorithm

TikTok is optimized to get as much signal as possible from users, as well as they were smart about getting some signal from the videos themselves: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/9/18/seeing-like-an-algorithm Something like Amazon gets very little signal after you bought something whether you really liked it or not.

anemic growth Twitter may primarily be a text-based medium and for that reason it appeals to people who are more textually and informationally oriented. This idea isn't original to me: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes, https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/17/the-audio-revolution/. Maybe there's much more growth in it: or maybe that's the nature of the company and product.

This piece by Eugene Wei: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/6/28/the-truth-is-distributed

Here's some praise: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/9/18/seeing-like-an-algorithm

Checking my rss reader ... https://feld.com/ (VC, but wide ranging) https://mapbrief.com/ Snarky GIS content https://randsinrepose.com/ Management advice for a level I'll never get to :) http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/ Right of center economics https://ultrasaurus.com/ Tech https://www.eugenewei.com/ Big pic tech and society

This article was popular here when it was published. https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049676 https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat

First time I see the foxes and lions thing, thanks for sharing. Found this link: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/3/6/paretos-two-types-of-elites-li…

These articles have been posted in previous HN discussions. I think you will find them useful in answering your question. https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the-network

POW for status is so difficult it’s practically nonexistent. Utility hasn’t been increased to compensate for inability to earn social capital. https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

A virtual personal assistant based on Twitter / text messages. http://boingboing.net/2007/11/14/i-want-sandy-perfect.html http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2014/1/7/i-want-sandy

There was a very good blog post about why shutting down the website makes a lot of sense in India (and many parts of the world). http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2015/4/6/tech-miscellany

I think you may like this: http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2013/12/1/hayao-miyazaki-vs-the-disney-p…