The Wall Street Journal tested out the TikTok algorithm with bots to see how quickly the app converged towards a user’s pre-specified interests. As viewing time of videos as the main signal, and to nobody’s surprise (I think), it only took a couple of hours for TikTok to narrow down interests.
This is how most social services work these days? The concerning part is that almost all TikTok videos are served based on the algorithm, which makes it easy to fall into terrible rabbit holes.
