> So what ends up happening on sites like TikTok is that you have to start very quickly swiping through your feed until something related pops up, and pausing for too long will undo your progress.
FYI, TikTok also has explicit like/dislike signals. For example, you can love posts, or long-press the video and choose "Not Interested".
Right, but what does "dislike" or "not interested" do? It's not that I hate it completely, but it's just not what I want to look at right now. So instead, I'm going to swipe through until I find some related stuff, like that, then hope the algorithm picks up on it. And then tomorrow, I have to get it to unlearn that because I'm looking for something else.
From what I've seen, loving a post has less impact that watching a video loop a few times. It appears that view time is the strongest signal, which seems logical.
And yet, that's so frustrating because sometimes I'm just curious! I really hate platforms that implicitly use view time as a signal because I have to be aware of that and make sure I don't spend too long on certain kinds of content. It forces me to "keep moving or else it'll learn something wrong about me", but since it's implicit there's no real way to know what it learned.
FYI, TikTok also has explicit like/dislike signals. For example, you can love posts, or long-press the video and choose "Not Interested".