You Can Completely Reset Your TikTok “For You” Feed

TikTok is addictive in large part due to its algorithm. But it’s not perfect: you’re watching too many recipe videos and suddenly the app thinks you want to know everything there is to know about being a chef. If your For You page is a bit out of order, there is now an easy way to reset the algorithm and start over.

To be fair to the algorithm (as I’m afraid of it), TikTok is more adept than most when it comes to learning what you like. From the moment you open the app, it learns how you interact with the videos in your feed, quickly learning which types of content you skip and which ones you keep watching. That’s why it’s almost impossible to look away from the For You page after a while.

But what makes it great also makes it problematic. If you interact well with one particular TikTok and, God forbid , share it, the app might think that you need a lot more of this type of content. Sometimes this is true, but often it is not. You can watch a long, sad video to the end once , and from then on, you’ll get tragedy after tragedy until your For You page turns into the inevitable cycle of depression. Or maybe you liked the other video on music production, and now every second TikTok is a three-minute analysis of how to mix vocals in the studio correctly.

It’s like when your family finds out you’ve got a new hobby and they never stop buying you gifts related to that hobby, even after you’ve outgrown it a long time ago.

So far, the Not Interested button has been our only way to directly tell the algorithm to stop showing us content of a particular style. But now TikTok is introducing a new reset button that will factory reset your For You page. Once you click on it, you will be treated like a new user – a blank canvas, ready to teach the algorithm what you want to see (and quickly decry what you don’t see).

TikTok will be rolling out this new reset button to its users over the “coming weeks,” so it’s entirely possible that the app will be banned in the US before you can check it out. But let’s say TikTok survives this latest challenge in the States. You’ll find the reset button by first tapping the Profile tab, selecting the hamburger menu icon in the top right corner, tapping Settings & Privacy , and then Content Settings . If you have the option, it will show here as “Update Feed For You”.

[ 9to5Mac ]