TikTok Killed the Video Star

It’s striking that TikTok, on the surface, prizes individuality but what truly sustains the platform is imitation and repetition and the all-too-human desire to be just like everyone else. Despite the many charming or strange or jaw-dropping videos on TikTok, far more of the videos are fairly mundane. They receive little attention, but the creators... See more

TikTok is the other “narrow straw” in today’s culture—and this is especially troubling. TikTok turns everything into bite-sized candy. Surveys reveal that teens embrace it primarily for its comic and zany attributes, and the rule for success on the platform is to “make your TikToks as short as possible.”

What happens if an entire generatio

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Spotify is great, but it’s primarily a single-player experience. Music, on the other hand, is an inherently social experience. Tiktok—originally, musical.ly—figured out how to make music social by licensing music, introducing viral “challenges,” and making user-generated content easier to create, even if they didn’t technically build a social graph... See more