I'm genuinely baffled by how popular Tik Tok has gotten. As far as I can tell, and admittedly I've never used either platform, Tik Tok is literally just a Chinese owned version of Vine. It makes no sense to me why Vine died, yet Tik Tok is taking over the web when it's basically the same thing.
The format really doesn't play as much of a part as you may think. Vine had its heyday but the content was always specific. It was the land of skits to everyone. I remember it being a bad service towards the end, like videos not loading or whatever, which is why I noped out of it, and not long after it got bought and died. TikTok came in a different landscape than Vine because Internet culture had firmly established itself as the mainstream, instead of just what certain kids did. I watched this happen in real-time in high school. Almost all the youth are 'in' on the
modern meme. TikTok acts less like a certain format alone, and more like a hub of many streams of content. There was another thread on this forum talking about the monoculture, one person brought up the subcultures was meant to carve out spaces away from the monoculture until they got swallowed up by it. Well TikTok is that, simultaneously the monoculture but also letting you stay in your own overseen bubble. Vine could never do that. TikTok is the home of the mainstream and altstream, it is the harbinger of trends and aesthetics, and the cutting edge zoom-humor And I swear to god it is the reason why everyone has those fucking RGB strip lights and gay keyboards. how did they astroturf RGB lights into video games?? Perhaps it doesn't even serve any other purpose but to prove they are in control, the kids WILL buy their Chinese manufactured strip lights and there's nothing you can do.
Okay I've ranted enough, so here's an actually interesting thing which practically nobody has mentioned about TikTok that I can't help but notice. On TikTok, there is a crazy amount of views an average person can get compared to most other social medias. if I want to make some YouTube video on a new channel, I can expect maybe twenty views after a day. On TikTok, my low was a fifty, my normals were a hundred or two hundred, and once I hit a high of maybe six hundred? All over the span of a month, and I wasn't trying to make anything viral, it was actual crap, yet it seemed I was hot stuff. I've seen accounts of people I know personally one guy who makes terrible shit, but garnered a cool eight hundred on a video of him lip syncing to a video I think there is some algorithmic magic at work which makes people feel like they get tons of views, and this is part of the magic that ropes them in, eager to seek their next Warholian success. It's the communal television where everyone has their spotlight, and there is no need for anything except emulation and mockery, and maybe a bit of debauchery. The real content, as in the content itself, doesn't matter. I don't know if it's because of the mushy meme culture, peoples mushy brains, or both of those mushed together.
It may seem like Vine is the same format as TikTok, but it goes deeper than the video limitations. TikTok is impressive the way a monolithic skyscraper is. It is a shelter for all its 'cultures' under its single watchful eye. It is the peak of all social media ideals. It is now the intimately expressive medium of our age regardless of it being good or bad, it just is. It triumphs over an app that spits out King Bach skits about
'When you wit da guys but yo girl say she home alone '