Data shows TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in the world, with 689 million monthly active users in January this year. On average, users spend 52 minutes per day on the app – mine usually before I fall asleep. It’s not unusual for the last bit of media I consume that day to be a compilation of interviews with Jade Thirwall from Little Mix where someone has ranked her Geordie accent from hard to understand, to completely undecipherable, or a time-lapse makeup tutorial based on the different districts from The Hunger Games.
And it’s this inability to predict which videos I’ll be shown today that keeps drawing me back; in some ways, TikTok’s unpredictability is its most attractive feature. Unlike Instagram’s attempt at recommending new content to users on their Discover tab, the app is too saturated with the same carbon copy influencers doing the “artful squat” to show off their latest chunky white trainers, to ever surprise you with anything remotely original – a pick n mix doesn’t work if you can only choose from strawberry laces.No one knows what they’re going to get with TikTok. Yes, there’s a whole side dedicated to mind-numbingly monotonous Gen Z dance trends, but that’s only a small part of it; there’s enough original content on the app to stop these videos from ever appearing on your feed. As a result, what will play next is entirely unpredictable. Well, almost entirely.
Like all social media platforms, there’s an algorithm involved. No, TikTok isn’t reading users’ minds and recommending them content straight from the inner layers of their prefrontal cortex, instead it’s giving them videos from accounts they often interact with, and clips that use hashtags and sound bites they have enjoyed before. Sadly, this data driven algorithm does discredit popular belief that TikTok can tell if someone is still in the closet by intentionally shoving them over to the “gay side of TikTok” – arguably, the best side to be on.
“No, TikTok isn’t reading users’ minds and recommending them content straight from the inner layers of their prefrontal cortex, instead it’s giving them videos from accounts they often interact with, and clips that use hashtags and sound bites they have enjoyed before”
Let’s take my mum, for example. After finally giving in to her asking me how “the TikTok website worked,” her recommended page is now a mixture of people trying their hand at that viral baked feta pasta trend, and satiric sketches about what it truly means to be a suburban Karen. The content on her feed might seem random to her, but it’s a systematic kind of random. She might expect a 10-minute meditarranean salad dish recipe to appear, but she won’t know whether it’ll come before the sketch of a middle-aged white mum sharing a photo of a random lost dog in a city three hours away on Facebook, or after. It’s a predictable kind of unpredictability, if you will.
However, a predictable unpredictability is still more unpredictable than the other apps in the game. And TikTok is steadily beating the competition; as of Q1 2019, TikTok was the most downloaded app on the Apple App store. Two years later, it’s only gotten bigger. Users of all ages are drawn to the seemingly random compilation of videos they find on their feed, videos that for some reason they can’t explain, seem directly targeted at their humour and demographic.
It seems TikTok was the first app to realise content consumers don’t like knowing what to expect anymore – the pandemic has made life mundane enough. In a year like 2020 when all the days blurred into one, TikTok offered us at least some variation to the Groundhog Day hell so many of us suddenly found ourselves living in.
