5 Minutes on my For You Page

I’ve long believed that TikTok is the most intelligent social-media platform I use. More than Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Youtube, I am continuously fascinated by what TikTok’s For You Page throws up.

Two things make this the case. The first is simple: TikTok is entirely video, so each post inherently contains more information to reflect on than on text-dominated Twitter or image-dominated Instagram. Most importantly, however, TikTok continues to be the most intriguing place on the internet because of the serendipity baked into its design: whereas other platforms are typically curated by the user based on the accounts they chose to follow, TikTok is akin to standing under a waterfall and letting hundreds upon hundreds of short videos from complete strangers pour over you. Videos take up the entire screen so are fully immersive, and the user basically has no control over which videos they see, making every swipe surprising (for better or for worse).

So, to test this hypothesis and as a gentle introduction / mission-statement for this blog, I thought I’d see how much I really can pick out from the content TikTok throws at me. Here’s the experiment: I will spend five minutes on my TikTok For You Page, browsing as I would normally but taking note of every video I see. These will then become the subject of intense scrutiny and academic investigation. Will I learn anything from this? I’ve no idea. But my main reason for starting this blog is that I want an outlet to talk about internet culture as it happens, and all the weird things people make when platforms like TikTok make it virtually frictionless to be seen by thousands of people. This experiment seems like a great place to start.

A note before I begin: This post is about TikTok’s For You Page but, given the personal ways the page works, it’s also about me. I think looking at someone’s For You Page in this format would be a great way to interview someone and find things out about them that might otherwise never come up. If you’re reading this and would like to go through your FYP with me for a piece, let me know!

The first two posts I see are notable for the relatively low number of views they have. The first is a short but very interesting commentary by user @nomeatmashers on Facebook’s recent rebranding as Meta. In the second, user @ronnilimps1_yso thanks her viewers for helping her reach 200,000 followers on the platform. At the time of my watching, neither video has more than 300 likes. I don’t think there is any other platform, be it YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, where I would so regularly engage with posts from strangers seen by such few people. TikTok is known for massive viral moments that reach millions of viewers, but I find that most of the content I see has been viewed by remarkably few people. This can create a strange feeling of intimacy between viewer and creator; it’s one of the reasons that TikTok often feels far more personal than a YouTube video with tens of thousands of views (“It feels illegal being this early” is a common refrain in the comments when people view TikToks with low view-counts from large creators). According to Chris Stokel-Walker’s book on the topic, TikTok’s algorithm does not heavily weight a user’s existing follower count when calculating how many people to present a video to. This means that a user like @ronnilimps1_yso, who has gathered 200,000 followers from her creative use of TikTok’s editing features and her powerful accounts of overcoming her addictions, far more regularly gets a thousand views than a hundred thousand.

The next thing I see is a lot more popular. Russian creator @vladmelton is live-streaming, sitting behind a bowl of what appears to be live maggots. In front of him is a sign that encourages his viewers (of which there are 6.2k when I join the stream) to send him gifts via the in-app tipping function. If they send a Crown he’ll put a maggot on his head, if they send a Gold Coin he will lick a maggot, and if anyone is generous enough to send a Church he will eat one. According to a sign at the top of the page, vladmelton is the 9th ranked streamer on TikTok this week. I rarely engage with live content on TikTok but I have noticed an increasing amount of maggot content. In recent days I have stumbled upon a dozens of streams of different people suggesting they might be about to eat live maggots (or other insects). I personally have never seen any of them actually eat one live on TikTok (Church isn’t even an option on TikTok’s tipping feature), but it appears that the suggestion a creator might eat one is enough to keep people watching. I swipe on.

Next, I see a paid advertisement for a YouTube Originals series about climate change. The ad is supposed to encourage me to switch to YouTube to watch a long-form video series of documentaries (long-form is relative these days: each episode is about 20 minutes long), but it is more of a reminder of the rapid dominance that TikTok has so quickly established in digital video. On launching in the US, TikTok reportedly spent $3 million USD every day advertising on other social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Youtube. As of this year, TikTok users now spend more time on TikTok than any of these apps. To see YouTube resorting to TikTok advertising to gain viewers speaks magnitudes on how much things have changed in just a few short years.

I’ve seen videos from user @harrylittle before. He is well-known for his impressive editing skills and short, satisfying videos. Set to the sound of a basic drum roll, the next video thrown up is a simple but well executed and hypnotic loop of circular objects he has found. While TikTok is no-doubt successful because of how easy it is to produce and edit videos in-app, using features only possible on external professional editing software seems to be a powerful strategy to generate interest in a video (often, TikTok will implement a native version of whatever tools people are using elsewhere, and professional creators like this are forced to find other tools). Harry’s video is fairly banal, perhaps more suited to the aspirational beauty of Instagram than the beautiful chaos of TikTok. This is appreciated because the next post I see uses external editing tools for an altogether weirder end: a video of a CGI Shrek singing along to a song by Doja Cat. Browsing TikTok is a profoundly surreal experience so it makes sense that, as with every other social media, surrealist content has become a mainstay of the platform. @bath.house used to post relatively harmless, somewhat comedic reviews of bath-bombs. I haven’t seen any videos from them in several months, but today I am shown a recent post in which it appears that even this formerly-innocent account has fallen down the surrealist rabbit hole. The format is still the same: three men share a bathtub and review a bath-bomb. But the tone has taken a dark turn: the top comment likens it to the movie Saw.

Sometimes the surrealism is unintended. One of my favourite TikTok accounts belongs to a kebab shop in Nottingham. In the video I see today, a group of drunk university students dressed as traffic cones chant loudly as the shopkeeper nods supportively. One traffic cone, the leader of the group, screams “get me a fucking kebab right now”. It’s an amazing video, and seeing it out of context at 9am on a Sunday morning is even more spectacular. It’s followed by a video of a worker unloading large amounts of sand from a massive container ship. ‘Context collapse’, the flattening by social media platforms of many different social relations into a singular interface, is often (rightly) pointed to as a cause of significant tension on the internet, but one of the things that makes TikTok so delightful is its apparent embrace of context collapse, such that seeing information with very little context (or none at all) can actually lead to more enjoyable experiences for users.

@james_ikin’s video is a good a post as any to end my five minutes on. He describes his experience using TikTok to the tune of Putting on the Ritz. The sequence starts with “Downloading Tiktok and giving it a chance” when bored in lockdown, and ends with “Falling into an echo chamber of things you already like and agree with,” and “TikTok having long-term impact on us that we aren’t fully aware of yet”. In the comments, other users voice similar frustrations: “It’s definitely destroyed any attention span I ever had” says one. At least three others say they have repeatedly tried and failed to delete the app. Should we be concerned about any of these issues? It’s certainly something I want to explore in other posts on this blog. I will not that none of the concerns raised are novel to TikTok; I wonder whether these users are complaining about TikTok specifically or digital media in general.

In just five minutes on TikTok I saw content from more than 25 accounts, most of which I had never willingly followed or subscribed to. I can’t think of any other social media platform (or even physical social situation) where this might be the case. For me, the unpredictability of TikTok is one of its most delightful and fascinating assets. The fact that I just wrote 12,000 about 5 minutes of it is testament to that. It can also produce problems, as hinted at in the last video I saw. It is fair to say that the cultural consequences of digital media are not fully understood. In future blog posts I hope to contribute to understanding it better.