Dr. Cal Newport

Because it's not public.

So like we don't exactly know how the algorithm works, but people have been studying it like a Skinner box, you know, a hundred phones.

And we look at all these accounts, look at the variables.

It seems like that's largely what it's optimizing for is how long did you watch before

You swiped, right?

And that's it.

So I mean it's not – this was both what was smart about TikTok and also why I've been arguing it's destabilized the whole traditional social media narrative is because the traditional massive social media players of the last decade had this first mover advantage on these giant actual social networks, right?

It's like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram had these massive networks of people's preferences of I'm following this person and this person I'm following, and they could leverage these actual social graphs.

as a huge source of producing interesting content, right?

And this was a huge first mover advantage because it's hard to get 100 million people to use something now, right?

TikTok got rid of all of that.

We don't want a social graph.

You as a user don't have to declare anything.

You don't have to follow people or say who your friends are.

We'll just start showing you things.

And that was more compelling

than what you could generate with a social graph, but now there's no first mover advantage.

So as the big social media players follow the TikTok model, which is much more algorithmic, let's just try to curate based on algorithms, not who you follow or who your friends are, they're now much more vulnerable.

Because TikTok could come along and do this without having to spend five years getting people to declare their friends.

And now someone else could come along and do this.