Evans: TikTok, Shein, and Instagram users act as a giant Mechanical Turk
Benedict Evans · Shein, TikTok and Netflix - thinking about limits · May 26, 2022 · at 19:25
Benedict Evans and Toni Cameron Brown analyze the mechanics behind algorithmic optimization and reinforcement learning on social commerce and video platforms.
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“And what you have in TikTok and what you have in Shein is you've got enough people looking at it that you've actually got that feedback loop. So basically the Shein user base or the TikTok user base is almost like a giant mechanical turk. Telling the system whether you, we're telling the system what's good and what's not good. Which is also what YouTube is, and Instagram is the users of Mechanical Turks telling you what's good.”
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