TikTok’s For You page has amnesia after the app’s resuscitation
Summary
- Despite still being available in the US after a brief outage and a Supreme Court decision, TikTok’s long-term future in the country remains uncertain due to ongoing regulatory pressures and a 75-day divestiture order.
- Since the app’s return after a brief outage, many users, including some outside the US, have reported significant disruptions to their personalized ‘For You’ feeds, with content becoming less relevant.
- The cause of these algorithm issues is unclear, with theories ranging from deliberate code changes to the impact of a temporary content gap from US creators on the algorithm’s performance.
The TikTok saga goes on. Although the app is still available to use in the US — four days after the Supreme Court upheld the Biden administration’s ban and two days after the app temporarily became unavailable — it’s long-term future is still shrouded in uncertainty.
US President Donald Trump today signed an executive order that grants TikTok a 75-day extension, within which, the app’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance must divest its holdings.
However, what happens 75 days from today might not be the only immediate concern for TikTok. Since the app came back on, there’s been a surge in users reporting that their personalized ‘For You’ feed isn’t all that personalized anymore, first highlighted by folks over at TechIssuesToday. Users have taken to Reddit to express their frustration, with some saying that the app had to “relearn their algorithm.” Further, even though the app only went dark in the US, users in other countries have also reported their For You page displaying irrelevant and unwanted videos.
“Okay, so I live in canada, and the day before the ban in the USA was one of the best days on FYP ever,” wrote user Minimum_Employee1614, adding that “My fyp is a pile of garbage now. My fyp was absolutely perfect before.”
A lack of US videos might have broken the For You page
It is currently unclear what might have caused the issue, though those that have put on their tin foil hats speculate that the platform went down so that it could offload the code that made its algorithm good in the first place — before the platform’s eventual deal with a US buyer. Others suggest that a sudden influx of returning US users might have broken the system.
The most plausible speculation, however, is that due to a lack of new content from US users/creators for almost 12 hours, TikTok’s algorithm, which prioritizes new content, was forced to push older or irrelevant content — this might have created the impression that the algorithm was malfunctioning. The US, as of July 2024, had the second-largest TikTok audience in the world. Undoubtedly, that number has only grown since, which lends strong credence to this speculation.
If you’re trying to get their old feed back, you can try manually searching and engaging with content from creators that previously made it to your For You page, essentially signaling your desired content preferences to TikTok’s algo. Otherwise, it might be time to lok for a TikTok alternative.
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