"There are four main goals for TikTok’s algorithm: 用户价值, 用户价值 (长期), 作者价值, and 平台价值, which the company translates as 'user value,' 'long-term user value,' 'creator value,' and 'platform value....'"

"The document, headed 'TikTok Algo 100'... offers a new level of detail about the dominant video app, providing a revealing glimpse both of the app’s mathematical core and insight into the company’s understanding of human nature — our tendencies toward boredom, our sensitivity to cultural cues — that help explain why it’s so hard to put down.... It succeeded where other short videos apps failed in part because it makes creation so easy, giving users background music to dance to or memes to enact, rather than forcing them to fill dead air. And for many users, who consume without creating, the app is shockingly good at reading your preferences and steering you to one of its many 'sides,' whether you’re interested in socialism or Excel tips or sex, conservative politics or a specific celebrity. It’s astonishingly good at revealing people’s desires even to themselves.... The app wants to keep you there as long as possible. The experience is sometimes described as an addiction, though it also recalls a frequent criticism of pop culture. The playwright David Mamet, writing scornfully in 1998 about 'pseudoart,' observed that 'people are drawn to summer movies because they are not satisfying, and so they offer opportunities to repeat the compulsion.'"

From "How TikTok Reads Your Mind/It’s the most successful video app in the world. Our columnist has obtained an internal company document that offers a new level of detail about how the algorithm works" by Ben Smith (NYT).

This article downplays the importance of ownership by a Chinese company (ByteDance): 

Many, many other products, from social networks to banks and credit cards, collect more precise data on their users. If foreign security services wanted that data, they could probably find a way to buy it from the shadowy industry of data brokers. 

“Freaking out about surveillance or censorship by TikTok is a distraction from the fact that these issues are so much bigger than any specific company or its Chinese ownership,” said Samm Sacks, a cybersecurity policy fellow at the research organization New America. “Even if TikTok were American-owned, there is no law or regulation that prevents Beijing from buying its data on the open data broker market.”

What I'm most interested in here is whatever David Mamet wrote back in 1998 about pseudoart. The NYT had a link, and it went to an Amazon page for a book, "Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama" (which I'll make an Amazon Associates link that works for me).

Here's the context of the quote you see above:

True art is as deep and convoluted and various as the minds and souls of the human beings who create it. We may return to the pseudoart again and again, like the compulsive eater or gambler, hoping that next time our choice will be correct. But the purpose of compulsion is not a search for peace; it’s an enforced strengthening of the compulsion itself. (People are drawn to summer movies because they are not satisfying—and so they offer opportunities to repeat the compulsion.)...

The film car chase and even the cry “there is too much violence in the films” reveal this: art, the organic medium for arbitration between the conscious and subconscious, has been pressed into service of the compulsion mechanism itself. Art, no longer the province of the artist, has become the tool of the entrepreneur—which is to say, the tool of the conscious mind. The conscious mind asks, “What is art good for?” and responds, “It is good for pleasing people.”...

Artists don’t wonder, “What is it good for?” They aren’t driven to “create art,” or to “help people,” or to “make money.” They are driven to lessen the burden of the unbearable disparity between their conscious and unconscious minds, and so to achieve peace....

The artist has to undergo the same hero struggles as the protagonist. If you’re sitting in the writers’ building on the Fox lot and getting paid $200,000 a week, you know that you’d better stop daydreaming and start coming up with Benji: The Return. 

But if you’re sitting all by yourself in the coffee shop, smoking that cigarette, you’re much freer to follow your own bizarre, troubling thoughts. Because all of your thoughts, at bottom, are bizarre and troubling. (If they weren’t, not only wouldn’t we go to the theater, we wouldn’t dream.) So there you sit in the coffee shop, talking to yourself. “Oh my God, is this the real thing? Has someone thought of this before? Am I insane? Is anybody going to like it?”