TikTok has probably one of the most complex and accurate algorithms out of any social media network. It's not perfect, but it makes everything else look terrible once you actually use it. And to the average person, the whole algorithm is still a mystery.
A few weeks ago, I found a strange quirk in the algorithm. I found a whole "hidden" type of feed that almost exclusively shows you sad, depressing vent content. I'm still not entirely sure how to access this feed, but I know the basics, and its easier than expected. In fact, I stumbled across this completely on accident.
It turns out, all you need to do is create a second account in the account manager. Granted, there are probably some other steps to this too. You likely need to occasionally interact with depressing content, have the algorithm think you're in a certain age range, I don't know.
When you make the new account, the first few videos that you'll see will be normal stuff that everyone sees when making a new account. But quickly, a certain type of genre will take over your feed: "secret accounts." When I discovered this, the first video from this category was text over a video reading "any other girlies on their secret accounts?"
All of these secret account videos will be depressing venting videos, with people in the comments also venting. These are usually about two things: either relationships or life itself. A lot of the videos I saw also mentioned themes of suicide. A lot of these will either be text over low exposure videos, or slideshows of mostly images made using the Instagram Create Mode.
The annoying thing is that there is no easy way to get rid of these videos. You can keep on hitting the "Not Interested" button and they will eventually stop, but it took hundreds of videos before this happened, and they still creep in about every 30 videos or so. You just somewhat have to deal with it.
While I like how this is giving people a place to vent their frustrations, at the same time I feel this will get people more trapped into cycles of depression, as seeing depressing content when you're already depressed can only end up making things worse sometimes. I know they have for me.
Anyways, I don't have much else to say about this topic. I just thought it was a little interesting.