In late 2018, a twentysomething named Jorge Reyes was in a small apartment in Mexico City, scrolling through grainy soccer highlights, dance routines, and cooking videos to determine which ones should be seen by more people. At the time, he most likely didn’t give it much thought. It was a job. However, what hundreds of millions of Spanish-speaking users saw on their phones was ultimately shaped by the videos he selected, the ones that caught his attention during a long afternoon of curation. It’s still weird to sit with that detail. A machine was taught what the Latin world would later find irresistible by a few regular curators who were drinking coffee.
There are a hundred different explanations for TikTok’s rise, and the majority of them are only partially accurate. There were the simple editing tools, the licensed music library that relieved teenagers of copyright concerns, and the massive advertising expenditures on Facebook and Instagram that subtly diverted users from the platforms that were running the ads. It’s all very clever. However, the For You Page is what people keep returning to, sometimes with admiration and other times with discomfort. FYP. That never-ending, mesmerizing scroll that seems to anticipate your desires.
The company’s disarmingly openness regarding the inputs and its continued opaqueness regarding the weights are intriguing. Likes, shares, comments, captions, sounds, hashtags, device settings, and language preferences are all taken into account, according to TikTok. Alright. However, you’ll get a shrug if you ask anyone in the company how a certain video gets on a specific feed. One employee was quoted by Chris Stokel-Walker, who wrote a book about the platform, as saying that even the algorithm team doesn’t fully understand it and that there is no magic formula or recipe. It’s difficult not to interpret that as a quiet admission of something more uncomfortable or as humility.
TikTok doesn’t wait for you to declare yourself, which is the true innovation that competing platforms still appear to be chasing. Your friends were necessary for Facebook. Your followers were needed on Twitter. Your subscriptions were required by YouTube. TikTok requires very little. It monitors the duration of a video loop, the speed at which your thumb flicks through a clip, and whether a particular type of sound causes you to pause. Passive signals are more important than active ones. The machine can continue to learn even if you just sit there and observe. Watching this unfold gives us the impression that our hesitations are being read more accurately than our decisions.
The experimentation comes next. The algorithm investigates. It is a test. It inserts a Formula One clip into your feed and watches to see if you become more receptive to supercars. In less than two hours, or even less than forty minutes, the Wall Street Journal’s automated accounts were known to reveal hidden interests. Forty minutes. That’s about the duration of a sitcom episode, a workout, or a commute. That speed ought to make anyone stop, regardless of how they feel about the platform.
The model appears to be the way of the future, according to investors. Reels, Shorts, and a dozen other imitators built on the same architecture of inferred preference are now ubiquitous. It’s still unclear if users will grow weary of being so well understood or if democracies will eventually rebel. It’s more obvious that something changed when TikTok began to look for our preferences rather than asking us to express them. Jorge selected the initial videos. Everything was then picked up by the machine. Most of us are still scrolling without realizing it.
