I check it out every few months or so when there's a new TikTok article on the front page of HN, and I can never understand it. All I see is 20-something nobodies dancing and making faces in front of a camera. I'm in my 40s and it's just not for me.
It's like a hyperactive Netflix. Instead of bingeing taking ten hours, it takes ten minutes. I'd suggest searching for subjects you're interested in, and "liking" videos that appeal to you. After the app learns your preferences, maybe about 75% of the feed will be related to topics that appeal to you. .
As another comment said, the more you use it the more it understand what you like and it gets better, and more addictive.
When I first started watching TikTok videos, I got the videos of 20-somethings dancing to the same song over and over and over. It was annoying. But now my "feed" is largely chefs making interesting dishes, like-minded people with opinions on politics (yes, I know echo chambers are dangerous), wood working, lawn care and pressure-washing videos for that dose of satisfaction, and then your random 10-second bytes of this generation's "America's Funniest Home Videos".
I don't watch every day, maybe a few days a week. But when I'm done watching, I'm usually grinning and feeling like it was time well spent, emotionally.
I've heard this from various places, but it doesn't work for me. Maybe I'm "unlearnable" or something. I spend a couple of hours on it, get tired of it because it's not appealing to me, come back a few weeks later, do the same thing, and nothing improves.
Or it somehow comes to understand that there's certain general topics I'm interested in more than others, but they're all seemingly variations on the same theme, just applied to different topic areas.
I'm either completely missing something or the death of TikTok will become the fact that it is so predictable that it's memeable. Inevitably someone will make a TikTok satirizing TikToks, and then everyone will move [back] to something else.
Social media sometimes feels like an echo chamber to me, never quite right. Blogs, websites, forums, and so forth (yes, YouTube) all make sense to me. Sites focused on bottlenecking communication all lose something key imho. It's like they're taking something meant to be supplementary and trying to force it as the main conduit.
As a late 30s individual, there's still plenty of niche communities to be pushed into once the algorithm figures out what people like us actually like.
I haven't seen a single "20-something nobodies dancing" video since the day I downloaded the app. All I get on my feed is DnD stories, interesting math, physics, and history facts, and the occasional standup comedy routine. Exactly the sort of things that keep me, specifically, engaged for far longer than I would like everytime I open the app.
Do a search for your actual interests, quickly swipe past the random things that pop up that you don't like, and soon, after a few days of this, you'll begin to see what tik tok's actually about.
> Do a search for your actual interests, quickly swipe past the random things that pop up that you don't like, and soon, after a few days of this, you'll begin to see what tik tok's actually about.
Or, like.. don't. I mean, great that you're having a blast, but this is a literal endorsement to "design your own skinner box". It's small comfort to be able to choose the colours of the bars on your windows.
If you don't use the app the way it's intended, you won't get the best experience. And since most people are actually aware of how Tik Tok works, then there's not much of a point of complaining about Tik Tok's lack of "interesting" content for you if you're not actually willing to engage with the software.
Don't forget the obnoxious robotic voice plastered over every video. I only come across TikTok videos on Reddit, but the moment I hear the voice I move on.
