It’s been a while since a new social application became big enough, quickly enough, to make non-users feel they’re missing out on an experience. The last time an app inspired such interest from people who weren’t on it was probably Snapchat. American social platforms, each fighting their own desperate and often stock-price-related fights to increase user engagement, have been trending in TikTok’s general direction for a while.
Twitter gained popularity as a tool for following people and being followed by other people and expanded from there. Twitter watched what its users did with its original concept and formalised the conversational behaviors they invented. Only then, and after going public, did it start to become more assertive. It made more recommendations. It started reordering users’ feeds based on what it thought they might want to see or might have missed. Opaque machine intelligence encroached on the original system.
Something similar happened at Instagram, where an algorithmic recommendation is now a very noticeable part of the experience, and on YouTube, where recommendations shuttle one around the platform in new and often surprising ways.
TikTok, however, assertively answers anyone’s ‘what should I watch’ with a flood. In the same way, the app provides plenty of answers for the paralysing ‘what should I post? The result is an endless unspooling of material that people, many very young, might be too self-conscious to post on Instagram, or that they never would have come up with in the first place without a nudge. It can be hard to watch. It can be charming. It can be very, very funny.
TikTok is far from an evolutionary fluke. Its parent company, ByteDance, recently valued at more than $75 billion, bills itself first as an artificial intelligence company, not a creator of mission-driven social platforms. TikTok was merged with Musical.ly, a social network initially built around lip-syncing and dancing and adopted by very young people.
“ByteDance’s content platforms enable people to enjoy content powered by AI technology,” its website says. Its vision is “to build global creation and interaction platforms.”
“It’s doing the thing that Twitter tried to solve, that everyone tried to solve,” said Ankur Thakkar, the former editorial lead at Vine, TikTok’s other most direct forerunner. “How do you get people to engage?” Apparently, you just show them things, and let a powerful artificial intelligence take notes.
TikTok does away with many of the assumptions other social platforms have been built upon, and which they are in the process of discarding. It questions the primacy of individual connections and friend networks. It unapologetically embraces central control rather than pretending it doesn’t have it.
