TikTok Remix Culture

TikTok really is incredible. I don't do much in the way of social media, but it's better than any other big app I've ever used.

The other really cool use I've seen of this style of stitching is emergent songs. Here's an example: https://www.tiktok.com/@patwhoisnice/video/69158104300531089...

Also, it's the first social platform I've seen that has solved the new user growth problem - every user's first few videos are guaranteed hundreds of views no matter what. So good content naturally rises without having to be spammy/promote itself. Compare that to something like Twitch where growing a stream to even getting 30 regular viewers can take years of grinding and a ton of hustle.

The average follower count for even just a regular user who has maybe 1-2 good videos can be in the low thousands.

Chinese livestreaming platforms have an addiction to inflating numbers, so I'm not sure if those are all real, or just growth hacking and user retention tricks.

Since it's just senconds long and users will switch if they don't like the first few seconds, the sunk cost is relatively low.

I heard their algorithm is quantized — first your video is “piloted” with a small set of people that are guaranteed to see it.

Then, if it passes a metric, it graduates to a bigger pool of people.

And then one more level.

There are plenty of experiments on this, testers opened new accounts and almost immediately they had hundreds of viewers, but when asked to repond in exchange for cash, no one did.

I mean, what's stopping them from doing this, everyone seems to be happy about it.

Initially they called these numbers "viewer count", but apparently it got too embarrassing even for themselves, one streamer reached 5.9 billion. Then they call it "popularity index" since everybody knew it's fake.

> when asked to repond in exchange for cash, no one did

Sounds like scam, honestly. How do you get that cash to me? Cause I just don't feel like giving my account number to someone on tiktok.

Like join WeChat fan groups? It's called private traffic, taking back control of your fame, and better milk your fans.

One big selling point of these predominantly female streamers is the previledge to add their personal WeChat, what for? Well, it's all about money and exchange.

The red-packet/micro-transaction thing is pretty big in China.