alt Hacker NewsTiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.
Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.
Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.
It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.
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My experience is that it serves you the content that you spent time watching and engaging with.
And it's quite easy to steer it towards a certain topic if you want to
I believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too.
Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"
The majority of the content feels regional, though.
Canada and potentially the UK are gonna be having the biggest shock I guess. Potentially Australia too?
The question is, was this a conscious human design decision or did the algorithm learn to do that by itself?
As an American in the US, I get quite a bit of foreign and foreign language content under For You.
This is the inverse to the situation you describe but it makes me doubtful that non-US don't see a lot of American content.
I don't think it does, I don't see any single content from my country's language. Tiktok is very good at adapting the content to you.
If its like Reels (I dont use tiktok) as soon as you are in France its only French content. Same for youtube.
Source?
My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.
TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.
This hasn't been my experience, using TikTok from Switzerland, I almost exclusively see English language, with a focus on my interests