What I'll miss about TikTok

With the embattled short-form video platform leaving us (maybe for good).... I have thoughts

If you haven’t seen the news, it appears that TikTok will “go dark” tomorrow (January 19, 2025). For my part, I’ve been using the app since early 2021. All the while, it’s been continuously disparaged by everyone in the news media, and also in my personal life. Well, if you wanna insult TikTok, you’re gonna need to go through me first.

A brief personal history

I heard about TikTok back in 2017-2019, and never gave much thought to trying it out. In 2020, during COVID lockdowns… well I also didn’t install it then. It took me until my second stint of living in Singapore to finally say “okay, let’s try this out”.

Actually, now that I think about it, it was an old friend who messaged me saying “Remember your old DJ mixes? Most of those songs are not on TikTok and I wish they were.” So, I installed it to figure out if I could get any of those songs on there. I never did figure that out, but I also wanted to see how it all worked.

I’d heard things like “the algorithm is really good”, and “it just gets to know what you like just by scrolling, even if you don’t favorite anything.” And, the algorithm was really impressive. It started with location-based videos. This content was cute, though not really within the bounds of my sense of humor or interest sphere. (Over time, it did indeed zero in on these coordinates.) I launched the app occasionally, but mostly… I kind of forgot about it.

A few months later, we had moved back to the United States. Sadly, that spring was a time of personal family tragedy, which meant I got to see my immediate family for the first time in years. At one point in those somber weeks, my little sister asked me if I used “the app TikTok”. Why yes, I replied, I had just installed it recently. She sent me some memes. I sent her some memes.

At my mom’s house later that week, a TikTok video about someone dying made me sad, and I started crying. I don’t actually cry that much. I hadn’t cried at all during the funeral. The relevant video was intended as a joke, but was “accidentally” sad.

Broadly, that’s the backstory. I never really wanted to download it in the first place, but ultimately became fond of it. It became the one app that left me with a smile after using it. While it could suck up 20 minute increments of my life, I almost always enjoyed those minutes.

“No tik tok”

So through the next few years, when I’d see a really funny meme, I’d save them to a collection of “all time funniest”. I’d actually come up with dozens of categories like this, but for that one in particular, I’d often post them in my group chat. My friends fucking hated this. They would reply “No tik tok” and either claim not to watch, or call the videos terrible. Undeterred, I continued to troll them. The videos were so funny, but they couldn’t admit that. They had to pretend they hated them, for societal conformity reasons, etc. TikTok is actually bad, don’t you know?

My friend’s reactions fit neatly into an undercurrent of sentiment I was constantly hearing in the population at large. One frequent complaint was “TikTok is a Chinese spy app” which is listening to you at all times. I’d always tell this complainer that all the social media apps do this, and LinkedIn is apparently the worst. It made no difference.

Another complaint was “it’s a waste of time, and it’s designed to be as addictive as possible”. I always felt befuddled when I heard this. You’re going to need self-discipline for literally everything in life. Can’t you just set your own limits? And TikTok is not at all unique in this area.

How about this one: “it’s only for teenagers”. That was perhaps true at one point, but by the point I’d signed up (4 years ago now), that totally wasn’t true. To be fair, it did skew a bit young, and I have a youthful energy about me even in my mid-30s, so I’ll agree with some of that complaint.

I’ve witnessed society do this, over and over, throughout my life. It becomes “cool” (actually conformist and lame) to hate something popular and new. Twitter was like this in 2009: “it’s only for techies.” Or, “you can only write 140 characters, which means you have no attention span.” (Many similar complaints for TikTok, btw.) It doesn’t matter the actual validity of the reason that you’re supposed to hate something popular and new, okay? What really matters is that we all hate that thing. You need to hate this thing with us if you want to be normal like all of us.

Regarding attention span… I guess that’s true? What’s preventing you from also reading a book? Again, it’s self-discipline, and it’s all personal choice. You’re angry about low-attention-span content existing? Is someone is forcing you to engage with it? (I mean, yeah, I did force my friends to engage with it, but that was just for the meme, ok?) And if you do choose to engage with it, can’t you also engage with other kinds of content? Is it really ruining your brain? How are you so certain? Finally, wouldn’t TikTok be considered a symptom of this broad shift in attention span, rather than a cause?

The self-policing societal rules around something don’t need to follow any logic. Liking TikTok makes you one of those people, but other short-form video platforms are somehow not taboo. Which brings me to the elephant in the room with “TikTok bad” complainers…

Instagram Reels

So many TikTok haters seem to have no problem with a shittier clone of it, Instagram Reels. The same people who’s blood boil the second they see that TikTok blue and pink watermark on a video will repeatedly send me insanely corny, insanely unfunny copies of 3-month-old TikTok memes, and then have the temerity to become angry with me for only watching the first 15 seconds of it.

Meta was able to copy many aspects of TikTok, but they’ve always fallen flat on the algorithm front… theirs has always felt markedly worse at finding out what actually makes me smile.

The content itself is also just different. It makes me feel like I’m watching a late-night talk show, having more so-called “clap-ter” than “laughter”. Based on how much copied memes I saw, it’s always felt like the IG Reels system was capable of regurgitating worse versions of TikTok memes, but not generating new ones. (We’ll see if this changes when TikTok is banned.) TikTok was able to gather a creative and optimistic audience, somehow. (For what it’s worth, TikTok has gone downhill in this area over the 4 years I’ve been using it.)

The whole thing reminds me of vaping, in a way. Back in 2017, every 20-something urbanite knowledge worker was buying and using a certain brand of vape called Juul. They were ubiquitous, at least in San Francisco. When the authorities later banned Juul on the grounds that kids were getting their hands on them, what happened? Did vaping go away in general?

Nope, instead everyone moved to disposable vapes like Elfbar and Flum Pebble. Now, instead of throwing out tiny little cartridges, people are throwing out entire electronic devices—USB-C port and all. E-waste? Can’t be bothered… into the trash it goes. 10,000 puffs per device? That should last you a week and a half. Once it starts to taste bad, you can still puff it for a while, despite the fact that you’re just breathing microplastics at that point. But these things are expensive, and you can’t afford $30 for a new one this week, now can you?

In case it isn’t clear, Instagram Reels is the disposable vapes of this analogy… a worse version of a foolishly banned thing that replaces the banned thing. It turns out pearl-clutching and screeching “won’t you think of the kids?” leads to worse outcomes for not only the kids, but climate change as well.

Throwing the plebs a bone

When you’re scrolling through videos on TikTok, you can see how many likes each piece got. You’ll get things with all sorts of like counts, from millions, to thousands, to sometimes under ten likes. In short, this is how they’re able to make such good memes; they realized that people with no audience still deserve a shot. Anything you upload will get a few dozen to a few hundred views, at least.

It’s worth examining this in a bit more detail. TikTok realized that they needed to steal a bit of value from the viewing audience to give to their creating audience. Which, in turn, leads to better content in the viewing audience in the long run. I’ve mostly been in the audience portion of that equation for these 4 years, with a notable exception…

I had an idea for a TikTok channel. I registered a new account and made a piece of content I knew would do well on the algorithm. This account had 0 followers. I uploaded the piece of content, found two accounts that were similar and left a few comments on their videos. This was just so a few people would click my name.

I returned to the app a day later to find the video had blown up. It had hundreds of thousands of views. The next two days, I made two more videos, each of them gaining a lot of views. I amassed 30,000 followers over the course of a week. The problem was that I was entirely uninterested in the channel topic. So, I abandoned it shortly thereafter, with the initial three videos. This was in early 2022. Every now and then I log into that account, where thousands of notifications always await me. Last time, one commenter had left me a comment “make more content, asshole.” Deepest apologies, dear sir.

My point of this story is that content that is actually good gets surfaced to the top, even from nobodies. Most other social media platforms do not do this. X does not. Instagram, including Reels, do not. YouTube did not do this for the longest time, but I believe they have started doing it recently. It’s painful to think about all the YouTube videos I made from 2014 to 2018 that sat at 0 views, demoralizing me to the point of abandoning various pursuits. Maybe that content was actually bad (this is likely). But couldn’t you have given me a few dozen sympathy views?

I will miss this aspect of TikTok.

Energy and optimism

I’ll miss the overall energy of TikTok. It’s always felt light, happy, energetic, and optimistic. To boil it all down to a single word: fun. You just don’t see that many other places.

Returning to my thought about things that everyone hates because society has decided to hate that thing, TikTok’s energy fits right into other things like this. From the outside, it sucks. On the inside, everyone is having fun. Things of this category that spring to mind: Fortnite, Burning Man, certain genres of music (YeeDM and Kawaii Future Bass for two), certain genres of entertainment (cringe shows like “Nathan For You” for one). The list goes on.

Goddamnit, I’m sad

I’m getting wistful as I write this. I feel genuinely sad. Writing this post was supposed to make me feel better, but I actually feel worse now.

Enjoy your victory, society. Congrats… you won.