Lessons from TikTok
some thoughts + reflections after making a TikTok account this week, after being a laggard for 2+ years.
Welcome back, <valued_subscriber>
Crossing the Chasm, the book I’m reading, discusses the ‘Technology Adoption Life Cycle’, which explains the market penetration of a new, innovative technological product in terms of the five types of consumers it attracts throughout its useful life:
This graph is especially top of mind for me because this week, I did whatever the opposite of “swallowing one’s pride” is and made an account on TikTok. Given how quickly it’s become the 7th most used app in the world, I’m firmly a TikTok laggard.
While nothing says hip and “with it” quite like a guy waiting until 2020 to start a mailing list (the only type of online community that predates social media dinosaurs like MySpace, Friendster, and The Facebook), I never bothered to explore an app with nearly three times (!!) as many monthly active users as Twitter until Monday.
Nor had I heard of Charli D'Amelio and Addison Rae (the two most followed accounts on TikTok at 63.3 and 45.6 million followers respectively), nor #FYP - the hashtag that seemingly appears in the caption of every video on the platform.
And FYI, it does not stand for For Your Pinformation, it stands for “For You Page”.
For the people over 25, TikTok generally has two browsing experiences for its users who don’t create content: the Following Page and the “For You” Page:
The Following tab is fairly straightforward to envision for those with a Twitter or Instagram account. It only displays videos posted by the TikTok accounts you follow.
But the FYP functions more similarly to the top part of YouTube. You know, the part that somehow always recommends eight videos you obviously want to watch:
Where, even if you refresh the page, you’re still interested in all eight videos shown:
It’s kind of silly anyone still makes online dating profiles after YouTube switched to this display. You could glance at those thumbnails, skim the video titles, and learn everything you could possibly need to know about a person in 30 seconds.
Key Distinction between YouTube’s Homepage and TikTok’s FYP:
While some of the above videos are 2-4 minutes long, a couple of them - not unlike the people who fail to understand how the algorithm works - are on the wrong side of 25.
Since I watch an alarming amount of chess streams and NBA basketball breakdowns, videos of these lengths continue to show up. However, were I only to watch two minutes of a 30-minute video, YouTube quickly takes notice (every YouTube video is tracked for when you quit your engagement - either by exiting the browser or clicking on another video), and learns to suggest shorter and shorter videos.
Hopefully you already know this, at least intuitively. If I’m blowing your mind right now, might I also suggest using an AdBlocker extension for your browser?
TikTok however, limits all videos to 60 seconds. In turn, the FYP is YouTube’s algorithm on steroids. The decision to watch a single TikTok (and even liking or commenting on it) is far less an investment than watching Chess streamer Eric Rosen attempt the slow, diabolical “Halloween Gambit”, as pictured above.
In layman’s terms, you could watch at minimum 20 TikTok videos in the time it would take you to watch a single episode of The Office. And that’s assuming all those TikToks last 60 seconds, which they rarely do. According to some guy’s blog, the average length of the Top 100 TikToks of 2019 was just 15.6 seconds.
In that case, you could watch ~236 (!) TikToks in the same span that you could watch three episodes of The Office (of which the average episode length is 20.5 minutes)
“We created the algorithms and now the algorithms are creating us”
Did anyone else used to browse Wimp.com? A site that posted 5 (now 6) videos a day?
Before discovering websites like Tumblr, reddit, and StumbleUpon in the 2010-12 range, and back when TiK ToK was still just a mildly over-played song at Bat Mitzvah parties, it seemed remarkable that whoever was in charge of Wimp.com could routinely find five new YouTube videos to share, every single day on the site.
In hindsight, they likely scheduled the posts several days in advance, but my friend Dylan and I would watch the videos posted each day and be sufficiently entertained. On average, two of the videos were great, one was okay, and the other two were forgettable. Describing this to a daily user of TikTok probably sounds about as foreign of an activity as “playing jacks by the soda fountain” does to a millennial.
Brief aside: writing this forced me to dig up my old Tumblr account. Here’s the bio:
Glad to know that nearly eight years later, not much has changed. Additional shout out to the six of my 27 Tumblr followers who subscribe to this mailing list. Congrats on being “Innovators” for the enterprise that is David Zucker and his writing endeavors!
The rest of you hopefully classify as “Early Adopters” (although if it turns out you’re “Laggards” and I’m running on fumes at this point, at least we had a good run…)
But I digress.
At first I was just lurking. I browsed the accounts of people I actually know from real life (remember that old thing?), and examined how they used the interface. This included friends of the mailing list, like @_HarirsCole and @MichaelSpencerMusic.
Just to see what would happen, I uploaded five clips of some songs I recently posted on my Instagram. I attached a few hashtags at random (mostly ironic other than the aforementioned #FYP), and was alarmed at how quickly they got viewed. Here’s what my page looked like a few minutes after posting all videos at once around 9 AM CST:
And here’s what it looked like just 24 hours later:
All I did promotion-wise was share the first screenshot onto my Instagram story with an invitation to follow my account, and followed “suggested accounts” until the app informed me I was following accounts “too quickly”, and forced to stop.
The bottom left video received 961 views, 72 likes, and 16 comments in 24 hours.
That very same video was posted 2 weeks ago on my personal instagram (which has about 920 followers), where it has 479 views, 139 likes, and 16 comments:
Even though only ~50% of the people who follow me on Instagram viewed the video, 37% of that 50% went out of their way to give it a “like”, and ~10% of them commented.
For comparison, my TikTok account had 6 followers at the time of posting. Even if the ratio of followers / views stayed proportional to Instagram, that still wouldn’t account for 900+ of the views on TikTok. Which means the rest of them came from the FYP.
So what does this allow me to infer about the (admittedly small sample size I have with the) attention span of TikTok users vs. Instagram users?
The higher % of engagement on Instagram can be attributed to multiple factors:
People who follow me on Instagram didn’t see it on a “For You” page, were aware I was posting songs, and clicked on the video knowing generally what to expect.
TikTok and Instagram have different definitions of what counts as a “View”
Most people who saw this on their TikTok #FYP quickly swiped onto the next video without watching the full video once they realized I was either a) not a hot girl, b) a white guy, and/or c) not compelling enough to spend 59 seconds with.
More cynically: Because my videos weren’t rife with flashy graphics and eye candy to keep TikTok users visually stimulated for the full 60 seconds, they felt a bit flat vs. the rest of their FYP, so they swiped to the next one. And the next one. And the next one…
“Do you fools even listen to music or do you just skim through it?”
- Jay Z, Renegade
Personally, I blame the Jumbotron for the public’s fascination with TikTok.
Think back to the last time you attended a collegiate or professional-grade sporting event. Sure, it might have been a long time ago. but indulge me. Remember how many chances the random attendee had to get onto the ~b i g s c r e e n~ ?
How if you’re cute enough, or bust a move, or sink an improbable half court shot, the entire arena roars. Whether you’re featured on the Kiss Cam, or dance like a maniac in the nearest aisle, there’s always an opportunity to get your 15 Seconds of Fame.
A big reason why the people who think they’re above “Sportzball” don’t care when sports come back is that their favorite part of attending those events is still in full-swing! Only now it’s in their pocket, and the switchboard operator can be flagged down with a trending hashtag instead of making a big sign containing the CBS logo, wearing a ridiculous costume, and frantically waving at them from a distance.
Frankly, it’s never been easier to get the undivided attention of strangers. If you’re stuck in the proverbial 300-level seats of life, with just 30 followers on your TikTok - no problem! Just learn a few dance moves and be attractive, or learn a few dance moves and be ironically unattractive, and you have a puncher’s chance to get on the FYP.
Compare that to the amount of time and hard work it takes just to set foot on an NBA basketball court without being apprehended. Malice at the Palace aside, there are at most 10 people on an NBA court at any given moment during a game, and an additional three if you count the referees. Every single person on that court spent years getting their reps in via AAU, high school, college, and international levels of play. They earned the right to have 20,000+ pairs of eyeballs stare at them for 2 hour intervals.
If you grew up in Gen Z America, knowing only UberEats, Amazon Prime, and full seasons of TV shows being released at once, which path would you gravitate towards? The 1 in 100 million chance of playing in the NBA, or the path where you can get just as big of a reaction from the crowd, while spending a fraction of the time to do so?
So now, we’ve created an entire generation of “bedroom performers”. Kids lip-syncing to DIY songs, learning dance moves, staring at their own faces for hours on end, and performing to venues of empty seats. Meanwhile, a global jumbotron behind the back row displays highlight reels of others doing slightly better versions of the same stuff.
If I reaallly wanted to, I could re-make the videos I posted, add punchy graphics that reinforce the lyrics, participate in a viral challenge, and have 20,000 likes on my original video by the next day.
But is that really the type of consumer anyone should want attention from? If the goal is to drive them towards something like subscribing to this mailing list, and you can’t even monetize your own original sound bites, what is the point in creating content designed for a user base with the collective attention span of a single goldfish?
If you’ve made it this far in this article, even half-skimming, you’re objectively not in TikTok’s target demographic. Again, 1000 people viewed my video in 24 hours, but only 80 of them paid anything resembling attention. On my Instagram, at least the people who viewed the video took the time to stop, (collaborate) and listen.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’ll take 4 quarters over 100 pennies any day of the week.
On a First Take segment last year, Max Kellerman - an ESPN pundit whose sole purpose appears to be to anger viewers so much they feel compelled to angrily re-tweet his ridiculous takes and do his advertising for him – made a surprisingly palatable argument about what should and shouldn’t be considered a sport.
He maintained that something can only be a sport if, when watching the event, you can determine the individual athleticism of the people competing.
By his definition, golf was therefore not a sport. While I normally find Kellerman to be tedious and aggravating, I actually completely agree with this definition.
Extending this line of thought, I think the reason some music snobs don’t “respect” newer genres like hip-hop, EDM, and their related sub-genres is because the audience cannot necessarily determine the level of musicianship the performer possesses in the way they can with someone like Nina Simone, Pete Townshend, or Eddie Van Halen.
That’s not to disregard the many successful electronic artists with extensive musical backgrounds. Zedd is famously a classically trained pianist, and any great rap verse has an inherently percussive element to its performance. But there’s something about the fact that Stevie Wonder personally played every instrument on his records that makes it feel like what he does for a living should be considered in a completely different league than someone who can do the “same thing” on their laptop. To me, this is similar to deriving the difference in athleticism it takes to be good at golf versus basketball.
So what does this have to do with TikTok, and social media influencers writ large?
Why do everyday people come off so awkwardly on a show like Nathan For You or Billy on the Street? Because it is objectively insane to convincingly seem “normal” on TV. It’s normal to speak with vocal fillers, to pace, to look away from the five cameras and boom mics surrounding you while a loud person shoves a microphone in your face and puts you in an uncomfortable situation designed to evoke a reaction!
The better someone becomes at mediated communication - whether that’s making aesthetically pleasing TikTok videos with tons of engagement, getting thousands of likes on their color-coordinated Instagram profile, or perfecting the craft of short-form argumentation by becoming a pointed voice on Twitter - the less time they have spent on improving their live-action, interpersonal communication skills.
It is not normal to know how to make videos that get millions of likes from strangers. And the more time you spend sifting through filters, looking at yourself, looking at yourself some more, and editing yourself on FaceTune or the TikTok beauty filter, the less time you’ve spent thinking about something besides your own mediated image.
Another part of why people from Gen X and Gen Y don’t understand why these younger celebrities achieve such a level of fame is because the mediums they engage with these stars on were not designed for a person like Charli D’Amelio to thrive on.
Addison Rae has never taken an Intro to Public Speaking course, let alone gotten the hundreds of reps one needs with mock interviews, a publicist, and a PR team to be presentable. So it’s no wonder her appearance at All Star Weekend was awkward!
Point being, and this might seem harrowing, but the better someone is at being a social media personality, the worse they are at being a real person.
And a generation of kids who absent-mindedly attend Zoom classes for 2+ years while absent-mindedly watching TikToks in their free time is a cause for concern.