So, I am well aware of privacy issue on and off the platform and, well, I would suggest using a secondary phone with it, or a tablet or even a virtual Android environment (Android Box/Emulator) on your computer and registering an account with an email address from such great providers as Proton Mail (no affiliation). Now, you are at peace-ish. That said, you can further increase your safety and privacy by not posting any content if most of the time you only want to consume content and maybe find some cool clips to share on your other social media accounts; TikTok is great for that.
Now, let us talk about the first thing I find awesome about it. TikTok very much bows to your will. I always say that I do not like AI or AI-ish platforms that are held by corporations and that use us humans to train them for free for some general purpose. I always liked Jarvis- the AI assistant from Iron Man. That thing was built primarily to assist Tony, evolve with him, carry and mirror his values, and offer up sage advice here and there based on Tony's ideology. That is what I would want- not some AI that has someone's else's ideology, core tenets and beliefs and then pushes them on me. TikTok sort of allows you to have just that. It is very, very good at recognizing what catches your attention- from spending like half a second longer on a single post from the main feed, to whatever you like, comment on and also flag as not interesting to you. True, it will give you more of what you connect with, but when you get tired and start to gravitate away, it will give you more fresh content to see if you are into it. That way, it grows and evolves with you. Sometimes, it also enforces your beliefs and preferences. Other times, it offers up a mirror and tells you you have gone too far with interacting with a certain type of content and it is time for a break. Over the last few years, I saw Instagram and YouTube try to evolve your feed or suggested content to better match the speed and flexibility of TikTok, but honestly they are far behind it. Now, what all of this means in terms of how people perceive TikTok is that everyone is wrong about what TikTok is to people. TikTok is nothing to people; TikTok is something different to each individual. So, if you love or hate your TikTok experience, you need to ask yourself why that is.
The second thing I like about TikTok comes from the first thing. Due to its ability to evolve its content feed rapidly and be very responsive to what your attention goes to the most, it allows for a tremendous amount of organic reach. Whether this changes or not, I do not know but I hope it does not. What this means right now is that accounts of any size can spread their content to people who are not even following them- the content is not siloed much at all the way it is on other platforms. This also allows all sorts of small businesses to try and create natural looking content, provide some value and attract potential customers. Sure, there are people like Onlyfans creators and dropshippers using this- nothing wrong with that but you may or may not agree. On the other hand, there are restaurants, lawyers, accountants, nutritionists and so many other more mainstream and offline businesses getting their reach out to potential customers. All of this, dearest readers, is happening without the need to run paid ads that, as many have seen increasingly on platforms like Facebook, are becoming super expensive and completely ineffective. This means that a small business trying to run lean can go toe to toe with big corporations. If things somehow stay this way and organic reach remains very powerful on TikTok, it will be the great equalizer. Also, I think it will be the standard for any new social media platforms in the future to build upon.
The third major thing I like about TikTok is that it is evolving the hashtag. In the beginning, hashtags were just words that people would organize content around on social media platforms, and they often spread to the offline world where they get a life of their own. While Tiktok also has hashtags, they introduced sound clips as the new iteration of hashtags. Now, sound clips- user-made, commercial use ones, popular songs...all of these are the real hashtags of TikTok. People use them to make content that goes well with them, or they use the sounds as a way of getting out there organically without paying for ads. So, regular hashtags started with image posts. Next, sound clips started to work as hashtags with videos on TikTok. Now, I am starting to see that certain video clips are taking on the role of hashtags. This stuff is pretty cool and pretty wild. In the future, what kind of content will video clips be hashtags for? I have no clue but it should be awesome.
There you go, dearest readers- a few major things I find interesting about TikTok that make it a worthwhile platform to check out. Have you had any first hand experience with it? What are your thoughts on it? I will leave you with that for now and I wish you a great rest of the week- especially the weekend! :)