American Idle
Eugine Wei,
Remains of the Day,
Feb 24, 2021
This is a long post on TikTok but it's filled with a ton of good bits and accords quite well with my own experience on the platform (though tbh there are no videos of me dancing on TikTok). What makes TikTok great, writes Eugene Weim is that it enables creativity and not just consumption. "After using TikTok, it does feel odd to go through Instagram and not be able to grab anyone's photo to remix," he writes. "They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content." The result is a slew of totally new social media phenomena, such as the reaction video, or the duet. "TikTok's Duet feature belongs in the social media hall of fame of primitives alongside features like Follow and the Like button." Then there's TikTok's 'For You Page' (FYP), supported by an exceptional AI that not only promotes well-established creators, but is equally likely to lift a complete unknown into meme status. There's a lot more; this article is to me a pretty definitive snapshot of what TikTok is today.
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