Through endless hours of scrolling — an hour a day, at least, for several years now — I’ve been accumulating hyperniche expertise predicated on my interests, conscious and subconscious. The result has been a gathering of online characters that, at this point, shape my cultural consumption far more than any celebrity or news source.
But increasingly in recent months, scrolling the feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space in a way that blocks access to what you’re actually looking for.
This has happened before, of course — the moment when Twitter turned from good-faith salon to sinister outrage derby, or when Instagram, and its army of influencers, learned to homogenize joy and beauty. (Some apps, like the TikTok precursor Vine, were shuttered before ever becoming truly tiresome.) Similarly, the malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.
It’s an unfortunate result of the confluence of a few crucial factors. Most glaring is the arrival of TikTok’s shopping platform, which has turned even small creators into spokespeople and the for-you page of recommendations into an unruly bazaar. The site is also seeing diminishing utility as an organic music discovery vehicle, weakening its connection to the one major entertainment industry that’s come to rely on it the most.
That fractured link has made it more challenging for TikTok to create and shift monoculture, which it had appeared poised to do over and over again in the early 2020s. (...)
Finally, and maybe most stubbornly, there’s TikTok’s personalization algorithm itself, which drives you further and deeper into your own taste, until it has been rinsed almost wholly dry — an asset that becomes, over time, a liability. All in all, you’re left wondering how a format designed for infinite scroll has come to feel so finite.
Just a handful of years ago, TikTok seemed destined to become the long-running platform for the short-form video revolution, the YouTube of phone-consumed content. Its most appealing videos have a homespun, almost accidental feel. You encounter them, get amused by them and then let them pass through. And yet some things stick around long enough to become true mainstream cultural successes: comedic routines, dance steps, slang. A vast decentralized conversation is taking place every day, and the promise of the app is that you might keep tabs on it while also being shown offramps to something new. (...)
With less common ground, users are increasingly seeing TikTok as a place to potentially monetize their online lives, an implicit acknowledgment that all this time spent online is a kind of labor. The D.I.Y. micro-ads that now clog the feed feel the most portentous — death by a thousand affiliate links. TikTok Shop began in September, and it quickly reoriented the app toward hawking. You can sell a product of your own, but most people make videos promoting products already in the shop, and then make a small commission if they lead to a sale.
The effect of seeing all of these quasi-ads — QVC in your pocket — is soul-deadening. Often, around two of every five videos are for products I don’t need: I have been offered a version of an ad for a specific magnetic phone charger over 100 times, easily, and I have seen people shilling for one specific oil-pulling dental health concoction even more often. The possibility of making a few bucks has turned ordinary people into creative directors and provided a steady flow of free advertising and marketing ideas for pennies on the dollar.
I knew the algorithm had fully broken me when I watched a video of a woman dismantling the lint trap on her dryer and immediately wondered why she hadn’t linked to TikTok Shop for the magnetic screwdrivers to rein in the tiny screws that were falling all over the place, or the slim cordless vacuum that would have sucked out the flyaway dust.
The speed and volume of the shift has been startling. Over time, Instagram became glutted with sponsored content and buy links, but its shopping interface never derailed the overall experience of the app. TikTok Shop has done that in just a few months, spoiling a tremendous amount of good will in the process.
But perhaps nothing has been as central to the TikTok experience as music; the app’s early era was accelerated by a merger with the lip-syncing app Musical.ly in 2018, and “sounds” are one of the platform’s organizing principles, allowing users to sort videos by the background music they pick.
The ability to search clips by sound made TikTok perhaps the most sinisterly effective music distribution tool since terrestrial radio. It combined happenstance with vast audience, allowing music that people enjoyed, or were paid to enjoy, to explode on an immense scale. The randomness seemed to come from the bottom up: On any given day of media consumption, TikTok offered the best chance to be charmed by something utterly unexpected — say, a sped-up remix of a song by Miguel or Lil Uzi Vert, or a guy on a longboard listening to Fleetwood Mac and breezily drinking cranberry juice.
In the year or two before the pandemic, TikTok was unmatched as a music discovery tool. But Covid forced everyone onto their phones, creating a content deluge. When marketers and publicists realized that TikTok was their best hope for attention, they swarmed, turning the app into a conventional promotional dust bowl. (...)
The way visual content is developing on the app, though, appears to be de-emphasizing music, too. Legible short-form ideas like dance routines and outfit videos seem to have given way to videos that lend themselves to smooth-brained and extended viewing, like clips of taming an unruly lawn or cleaning a muddy area rug. This is visual A.S.M.R., no sound required. (TikTok has also been encouraging some creators to post longer, original videos less reliant upon the intellectual property of others.)
It all underscores a fundamental TikTok issue that remains unsolved: There hasn’t yet been an evolution in optimal content form. The narrative styles that will work best in this format haven’t been honed yet, at least not by professionals. For an app that claims a lot of attention, it doesn’t demand much brainpower. That leaves TikTok vulnerable to the moments when viewers, to put it simply, snap out of it.
The effect of seeing all of these quasi-ads — QVC in your pocket — is soul-deadening. Often, around two of every five videos are for products I don’t need: I have been offered a version of an ad for a specific magnetic phone charger over 100 times, easily, and I have seen people shilling for one specific oil-pulling dental health concoction even more often. The possibility of making a few bucks has turned ordinary people into creative directors and provided a steady flow of free advertising and marketing ideas for pennies on the dollar.
I knew the algorithm had fully broken me when I watched a video of a woman dismantling the lint trap on her dryer and immediately wondered why she hadn’t linked to TikTok Shop for the magnetic screwdrivers to rein in the tiny screws that were falling all over the place, or the slim cordless vacuum that would have sucked out the flyaway dust.
The speed and volume of the shift has been startling. Over time, Instagram became glutted with sponsored content and buy links, but its shopping interface never derailed the overall experience of the app. TikTok Shop has done that in just a few months, spoiling a tremendous amount of good will in the process.
But perhaps nothing has been as central to the TikTok experience as music; the app’s early era was accelerated by a merger with the lip-syncing app Musical.ly in 2018, and “sounds” are one of the platform’s organizing principles, allowing users to sort videos by the background music they pick.
The ability to search clips by sound made TikTok perhaps the most sinisterly effective music distribution tool since terrestrial radio. It combined happenstance with vast audience, allowing music that people enjoyed, or were paid to enjoy, to explode on an immense scale. The randomness seemed to come from the bottom up: On any given day of media consumption, TikTok offered the best chance to be charmed by something utterly unexpected — say, a sped-up remix of a song by Miguel or Lil Uzi Vert, or a guy on a longboard listening to Fleetwood Mac and breezily drinking cranberry juice.
In the year or two before the pandemic, TikTok was unmatched as a music discovery tool. But Covid forced everyone onto their phones, creating a content deluge. When marketers and publicists realized that TikTok was their best hope for attention, they swarmed, turning the app into a conventional promotional dust bowl. (...)
The way visual content is developing on the app, though, appears to be de-emphasizing music, too. Legible short-form ideas like dance routines and outfit videos seem to have given way to videos that lend themselves to smooth-brained and extended viewing, like clips of taming an unruly lawn or cleaning a muddy area rug. This is visual A.S.M.R., no sound required. (TikTok has also been encouraging some creators to post longer, original videos less reliant upon the intellectual property of others.)
It all underscores a fundamental TikTok issue that remains unsolved: There hasn’t yet been an evolution in optimal content form. The narrative styles that will work best in this format haven’t been honed yet, at least not by professionals. For an app that claims a lot of attention, it doesn’t demand much brainpower. That leaves TikTok vulnerable to the moments when viewers, to put it simply, snap out of it.
by Jon Caramanica, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stephen Dybus
[ed. See also: On TikTok, who owns a viral dance? (Vox); and, Universal Music Group Pulls Songs From TikTok (NYT):]"On Tuesday, a day before its licensing contract with TikTok was set to expire, Universal — the largest of the three major record companies — published a fiery open letter accusing TikTok of offering unsatisfactory payment for music, and of allowing its platform to be “flooded with A.I.-generated recordings” that diluted the royalty pool for real, human musicians.
TikTok confirmed early Thursday that it had removed music from Universal, and videos on the app began to show the effects of the broken partnership. Recordings by Universal artists were deleted from TikTok’s library, and existing videos that used music from Universal’s artists had their audio muted entirely. Universal songs were also unavailable for users to add to new videos.
A video posted by Kylie Jenner in September, for example, using a song by Lana Del Rey, who is signed to a Universal label was silent, with a note saying, “This sound isn’t available.” (Commenters to the video had remarked on the music.) Other videos carried similar statements, including “Sound removed due to copyright restrictions.”
