💡Friends vs Stranger Feeds

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.

—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:

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.)—

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