How TikTok Keeps You Watching

By Ben SmithDec. 5, 2021, 11:00 p.m. ET

There are four main goals for TikTok’s algorithm: 用户价值, 用户价值 (长期), 作者价值, and 平台价值, which the company translates as “user value,” “long-term user value,” “creator value,” and “platform value.”

That set of goals is drawn from a frank and revealing document for company employees that offers new details of how the most successful video app in the world has built such an entertaining — some would say addictive — product.

The document, headed “TikTok Algo 100,” was produced by TikTok’s engineering team in Beijing. A company spokeswoman, Hilary McQuaide, confirmed its authenticity, and said it was written to explain to nontechnical employees how the algorithm works. The document offers a new level of detail about the dominant video app, providing a revealing glimpse both of the app’s mathematical core and insight into the company’s understanding of human nature — our tendencies toward boredom, our sensitivity to cultural cues — that help explain why it’s so hard to put down. The document also lifts the curtain on the company’s seamless connection to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, at time when the U.S. Department of Commerce is preparing a report on whether TikTok poses a security risk to the United States.

If you’re among the billion people (literally!) who spend time on TikTok every month, you’re familiar with the app as 2021’s central vehicle for youth culture and online culture generally. It displays an endless stream of videos and, unlike the social media apps it is increasingly displacing, serves more as entertainment than as a connection to friends.

It succeeded where other short videos apps failed in part because it makes creation so easy, giving users background music to dance to or memes to enact, rather than forcing them to fill dead air. And for many users, who consume without creating, the app is shockingly good at reading your preferences and steering you to one of its many “sides,” whether you’re interested in socialism or Excel tips or sex, conservative politics or a specific celebrity. It’s astonishingly good at revealing people’s desires even to themselves — “The TikTok Algorithm Knew My Sexuality Better Than I Did,” reads one in a series of headlines about people marveling at the app’s X-ray of their inner lives.

TikTok has publicly shared the broad outlines of its recommendation system, saying it takes into account factors including likes and comments as well as video information like captions, sounds and hashtags. Outside analysts have also sought to crack its code. A recent Wall Street Journal report demonstrated how TikTok relies heavily on how much time you spend watching each video to steer you toward more videos that will keep you scrolling, and that process can sometimes lead young viewers down dangerous rabbit holes, in particular toward content that promotes suicide or self-harm — problems that TikTok says it’s working to stop by aggressively deleting content that violates its terms of service.

The new document was shared with The New York Times by a person who was authorized to read it, but not to share it, and who provided it on the condition of anonymity. The person was disturbed by the app’s push toward “sad” content that could induce self-harm.

The document explains frankly that in the pursuit of the company’s “ultimate goal” of adding daily active users, it has chosen to optimize for two closely related metrics in the stream of videos it serves: “retention” — that is, whether a user comes back — and “time spent.” The app wants to keep you there as long as possible. The experience is sometimes described as an addiction, though it also recalls a frequent criticism of pop culture. The playwright David Mamet, writing scornfully in 1998 about “pseudoart,” observed that “people are drawn to summer movies because they are not satisfying, and so they offer opportunities to repeat the compulsion.”

To analysts who believe algorithmic recommendations pose a social threat, the TikTok document confirms their suspicions....

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-algorithm.html