I played with TikTok for a week or so. Every time I opened it, it was suggesting feeds featuring clearly mentally impaired people with large audiences throwing money at them for saying their name. It felt like a very concerted effort to dumb down the American population. You wouldn’t listen to these people for 10 seconds out in public. The fetal alcohol syndrome phenotype was widespread. The entire experience was disturbing, to be honest.

I'm not a fan either (and don't bother with it) but TikTok and co try to prey on your ... sorry try to show you stuff that they think you want to see, indexed on advert spend and a few other factors that will maximise advert spend return. That is their entire raison d'etre.

So, why on earth are they displaying stuff that you say is disturbing? There is no profit in that and TikTok is all about profit, ideally from abroad, ie market share.

I'm sure that the American population is incapable of being dumbed down any further.

Log a bug.

Maybe it's just you. To me it shows totally different stuff, equally stupid, by default (e.g. if I go with a new account), but easily changeable with very little targeted watching (it picks your interests quite fast)

The fairly accurate joke is that the algorithm is really just telling on yourself.

> it was suggesting feeds featuring clearly mentally impaired people with large audiences throwing money at them for saying their name

I've never seen that. I saw D&D content and discussions about gamedev. The feed is what you make of it, and TikTok's very famous algorithm shows you what you signal you will watch.

Feel free to disagree, and maybe you are the very rare exception, but you watched that stuff for a week or so, and I have no idea what you are referring to.