American Idle — Remains of the Day

Can you program human movement with music? It turns out you can. You use an API called TikTok. That's delightful.

I’ve tended to think of social networks as being built by people assembling a graph of people bottoms up, but perhaps I’ve been too narrow-minded. TikTok might not qualify by that definition, but it feels social, with FYP as village matchmaker.

This is why TikTok's network effects of creativity matter. To clone TikTok, you can't just copy any single feature. It's all of that, and not just the features, but how users deploy them and how the resultant videos interact with each other on the FYP feed. It's replicating all the feedback loops that are built into TikTok's ecosystem, all of which... See more

Of course, people grab TikToks and share them on YouTube or Twitter or as Reels on Instagram, but those apps receive flattened video files and can’t break them into component parts to be remixed the way you can on TikTok. Those other services are fine endpoints for distribution, but the creativity happens on TikTok. Don't get me started on apps lik... See more

The toughest job for any creative is the cold start. The blinking cursor on the blank page in a new document. Granted, writing a tweet, or even shooting an Instagram photo, isn't like composing the great American novel. But we tend to underrate the extent to which new users often churn without having ever posted anything to a social network because... See more

Yes, there are quote tweets and replies, but the TikTok Duet is the video analog, so simple and elegant in its design that you wonder why YouTube didn't launch it ten years ago, and then you remember that YouTube hasn't launched any creator tools of note since...ever.

TikTok's Duet feature belongs in the social media hall of fame of primitives alongside features like Follow and the Like button.

TikTok launches seemingly a new video effect or filter every week. I regularly log in and see creators using some filter I've never heard of, and some of them are just flat out bonkers. What creators can accomplish with some of these filters I can't even fathom how I'd replicate in something like the Adobe Creative Suite.

They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content. In their app, they have a wealth of features that make it dead simple to grab any element from another TikTok and incorporate it into a new TikTok.