Essay: How do you describe TikTok?

5. Algorithmic feeds are failing: StumbleUpon helped me start to understand, almost at a humanistic level, how vast the internet could be. TikTok often yields a similar result, though with a key difference. On TikTok, almost all videos trend toward a kind of visual consistency and repeatability. Silly voices or bits of speech become ‘sounds’, to be... See more

Like Snapchat, it has a novel format. But if you just focus on the format, you miss the point. The most important thing is the purpose and structure of the network. TikTok users aren’t sharing with their friends, they’re performing for the world. They’re not keeping up with familiar faces, they’re discovering new ones. It’s hard to prove this is tr... See more