I have many a qualm with TikTok. I think 95% of it is a waste of cyberspace full of memelords desperate for a quick laugh and aspiring influencers desperate for a quick "Like." That's far harsher than it needs to be, but I really just don't get it. I don't hate TikTok. I'm just thoroughly unamused by it. But there's still a 5% of TikTok that I think is brilliant, and that 5% concerns how everyone on the platform has a belief that they too can create something really cool that's worth sharing.
TikTok, in one way or another, has built a hyper-social culture around its platform that very much encourages people to add their own content into the community, not just consume other people's content. I think a lot of this can be attributed to the fact TikTok at its core follows a very "bottom-up" model: all the biggest trends and videos funnel up from individual users rather than down from bigger corporations or controlling bodies, and this encourages other individual users to get in on the action. In other words, I think it has really democratized content creation and given everyone the license to participate. Not every platform has been as successful in doing this. On YouTube, there has always seemed to be a very clear "creator vs consumer" delineation among its users, and there's not a ton of cross-pollination. That divide is still present on TikTok, but it's definitely not as defined. A lot of people have casually made two or three TikToks. I don't think as many people have casually made two or three YouTube videos.
TikTok started with people recreating C+ dance routines, but it's since evolved into people sharing crazy stories about the time they met Pitbull or making montage tributes to their best friends or revealing a never-before-heard fact about President Franklin Pierce. It's really quite beautiful that everyone is feeling empowered to create in this way. It's not like anything drastic has changed technologically that allows users to do this; anyone who can today create a TikTok montage of sexy Tom Brady photos was surely capable of doing it three years ago without TikTok. But that doesn't mean there has always been a strong encouragement in the past to share that montage into the broader world.
It's not really my role to start widely judging the quality of this content or the merits behind what's going viral or the practicality of any of these videos. All I'm saying is any time you give someone both the tools and the platform to turn an idea in their head into a finished piece of work that can be shared is really special. The community of TikTok users has done a great job in making everyone feel like they have a role in creating something for the site and adding to this corpus of content, whether that person is documenting a chicken parmesan recipe or daydreaming about seeing Harry Styles at a urinal.
It's cool. That still doesn't mean I have to enjoy the videos though.
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