TikTok Remix Culture

I have never seen so many to say "average" people on tiktok like on any other social platform, in a sense that I can relate to those people and don't feel like a celebrity is trying to feed me some content down my throat. There's so much of normalization of everything that I'm blown away by how normal Tiktok is, you can see teenagers struggling in a school, you can see people hating their 9-5 jobs, you can see crafts and arts, you can see people with disabilities living life at its fullest, cooking videos, etc.

The whole vibe is so wholesome that it's truly the first social network that feels social in a wide sense.

Tiktok is full of girls dancing with very little or very tight clothes on for likes and attention. It's really seedy. There's subreddits dedicated to posting about these accounts.

On top of that it is designed to be addicting for the sake of addiction. It doesnt matter what the video is about once it will keep the user on the app. The algorithm will work out the perfect way for each person to be sucked in. We all know that these addicting videos won't be educational or even worthwhile. This type of stuff trends towards really useless content.

Of all the social media out there I would not let my kids use tiktok.

TikTok is very good at recommending new content based on what you engage with (watch, like, comment, etc), if your feed is full of girls dancing, it's because you spend time actually watching it instead of just moving to the next video. My feed is full of people (for some reason mostly eastern european or from central asia) working at their construction jobs.

I don't think this invalidates GP's point. Sure, if you don't want the seedy content, you won't see it, but it's still there and that's still a large part of how they make money.

If a site has user contributed content there will usually be the "seedy" content. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit...if it gets big enough, a certain segment will monetize it. Usually as an advertising vehicle for their more overt content on adult sites. It's actually an interesting complaint because TikTok takes a lot of heat for taking down a lot of benign content.

"that's still a large part of how they make money"

You base this claim upon what? Gut feeling?

The viral videos that everyone knows from TikTok contain approximately zero instances of "seedy" content. They are people doing everyday things. AFV style funny videos. Some guy drinking cranberry juice and riding a skateboard. Etc.

I don’t have TikTok, but when I am sent a link to it, and watch the linked video in Safari with Wipr content blocker, after the linked video is finished, it immediately auto plays a video of a very young blonde girl/woman who claims she recently found pictures of her pre breast reduction pre meeting her husband and is going to show them to her husband or something. This happens after any linked video I am sent, all non sexual.

Only reason I remember is because I thought that was a pretty transparent attempt at the type of audience they were aiming to attract.

TikTok doesn't autoplay anything -- it repeats the video you watched. Do you mean you scrolled down?

Further, obviously the seed video that you used is going to have an enormous influence on subsequent videos (as presumably would the sender -- shared links can contain details about the sender, and if they had a logical algorithm that can play a part as well). And of course surely we all know that sites don't just track by being logged in. Even if you clear all cookies.

I just opened the TikTok homepage through a proxy in a clean instance of Firefox. First video was a woman who paints patterns on her face. Second was someone show a technique to clean stainless steel sinks. Third was a guy in Turkey showing his rugs. Then a dog bringing a leash back to its owner, someone using one of those pop-it distraction things, a guy with his cat in a box in front of a roller coaster video pretending the cat is on the roller coaster.

Eh. I don't see how your anecdote is such strong evidence of the "type of audience they were aiming to attract" (especially when the site seems to overwhelmingly cater to adult women...)