There's the similar but related problem of "I'm more interested in creative posts today, but there's no way for me to register that intent". So what ends up happening on sites like TikTok is that you have to start very quickly swiping through your feed until something related pops up, and pausing for too long will undo your progress.
Instagram's "explore" page works pretty excellently for this; each post on the grid there is essentially a separate feed. For example on mine the top several posts are: queer art, Zelda, car crash videos, less specific art, 40k memes, politics relevant to me, cat memes, and so on. Each of those is something that Instagram has good reason to think I'd like, and the posts stay fairly consistent with the vibe of the first post as I scroll through any of those feeds.
> So what ends up happening on sites like TikTok is that you have to start very quickly swiping through your feed until something related pops up, and pausing for too long will undo your progress.
FYI, TikTok also has explicit like/dislike signals. For example, you can love posts, or long-press the video and choose "Not Interested".
Right, but what does "dislike" or "not interested" do? It's not that I hate it completely, but it's just not what I want to look at right now. So instead, I'm going to swipe through until I find some related stuff, like that, then hope the algorithm picks up on it. And then tomorrow, I have to get it to unlearn that because I'm looking for something else.
From what I've seen, loving a post has less impact that watching a video loop a few times. It appears that view time is the strongest signal, which seems logical.
And yet, that's so frustrating because sometimes I'm just curious! I really hate platforms that implicitly use view time as a signal because I have to be aware of that and make sure I don't spend too long on certain kinds of content. It forces me to "keep moving or else it'll learn something wrong about me", but since it's implicit there's no real way to know what it learned.
