ByteDance's Recommendation System

[ryanar]

Past discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35573624

[pixelatedindex]

The article linked in that post is dead (403). Here is a cached version:

https://archive.is/DDUjQ

[tasn]

I very much doubt this is the TikTok algorithm.

1. It doesn't even claim to be that.

2. It's over a year old - so even if it was, this is no longer it.

3. There's zero incentive for them to release it, but every incentive to release a fake one.

4. TikTok is too much of a national asset, I doubt the Chinese government would not use it to their advantage (and transparency would be counter to that).

Edit: there's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471278

[paulluuk]

From what I can tell, they didn't release the actual model, but rather a kind of framework for running and training models in a distributed way. The only actual "model" in there appears to be three Dense layers in a "demo" file.

[mrfox321]

I mean, it's their serving infra, but not their features. See my reply in another parent comment.

[xnx]

Like Facebook before, everyone talks about the TikTok algorithm being some super secret and valuable mystery. In reality, both Facebook and TikTok succeeded because they were at the right place at the right time and didn't screw things up. The TikTok recommendation system is smart and very well implemented, but nothing novel that couldn't be implemented by a dozen other teams.

[mrfox321]

Not true. Why do IG reels and YouTube shorts suck, then?

They clearly built something superior. And it can't seem to be matched by the biggest tech companies.

[smokel]

Everyone talks about TikTok having some valuable algorithm, but I keep running into the most dimwitted nonsense every time I try it.

Then again, perhaps this is the algorithm's way of scaring me away to save precious bandwidth, knowing full well that I will never buy products from online ads anyway?

[xnx]

Additional evidence that TikTok doesn't possess special algorithm and infrastructure prowess is the complete failure(/gaming?) of search. Many (most?!) searches on TikTok have been returning irrelevant shock and/or porn content for weeks.

[wbl]

What did Livejournal, Xanalga, Myspace, Tumblr, all screw up and Facebook do right? Facebook had stiff competition from the start.

[PittleyDunkin]

...so then instagram and facebook and twitter and bluesky and reddit and youtube etc etc all have extremely bad content discovery by choice? Why?

[tw1984]

for those interested, Chinese laws forbid the export of recommendation systems, unless ByteDance is challenging the Chinese laws here, which is highly unlikely, this simple can not be the recommendation system used in their production.

will be far more interesting to know say what is the difference, what got changed/removed to make them feel comfortable that such an open source variant won't get them into troubles with some 3-letters-acronym agencies back home.

[voxic11]

This is essentially the framework for executing their recommendation system but the actual piece which determines the recommendation is a model called "demo" so I presume its not the actual ML model they use in production.

[davidjfelix]

Context: ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok. Frequently people talk about "the tiktok algorithm". This is that.

[zenogantner]

While this is from ByteDance, who also are behind TikTok, this algorithm is likely not the one behind TikTok.

Instead, it is likely a component that powers ByteDance's commercial recommender system solution, which they market to e-commerce companies: https://www.byteplus.com/en/product/recommend

This was mentioned in past discussions of the paper on HN.

And even if aspects of this are used for TikTok: (a) it would be just one of many components of their recommendation system, and (b) the TikTok recommendation system has changed a lot during the 2+ years since this has been published.

So take what you see here with a grain of salt. After reading the paper and the code, you will NOT know how TikTok's recommendations work.

[pavlov]

There's also a heavy element of manual curation in TikTok. They have people putting their fingers on the scales to decide what content gets promoted. Where are those people, and what's their agenda? Who knows.

Releasing the recommender on Github is a way to try to diffuse that criticism. But it's just one part of the puzzle that is Tiktok's content distribution.

[PaulHoule]

There are a lot of interesting projects in that GitHub account, I didn't know ByteDance was such an open source hero!