💡Friends vs Stranger Feeds

Tiktok trying to be more Twitter. Twitter trying to be more Tiktok

Hey Friends 👋,

The big novel idea that Tiktok brought to social media was its algorithmic feed full of strangers

A few months ago, Twitter, the last social media holdout, implemented its own version of the For You page and made it the default way users interact with Twitter.

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While everyone is trying to copy For You page, Tiktok has been busy moving in the direction of adding more specific feeds.

Here are two experiments they recently ran:

💡 Experiment 1: Tiktok Topic Specific Feed

The Control arm won. Topic-specific feeds were never launched.

💡 Experiment 2: Tiktok Friends Only Feed

In the next iteration, Tiktok was more aggressive and tested a Friends-specific feed. Friends feed shows only Tiktoks from people that mutually follow each other.

It’s funny to see Tikotok investing in a non-algorithmic user-curated feed while Twitter and other social media companies are doing the exact opposite.

(This test is still running, so TBD on the results.)
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I found these experiments to be a good reminder that value accrues at polar ends of a spectrum (& anything in between is kind of moot).

Until next week,

Ali Abouelatta