Before going to college and living with people, I basically had little contact with people in real life. The interactions at school were also superficial. I usually don't go out, and most of my social interactions take place online, so you could say that I have always lived in my own comfortable cocoon. It wasn't until I started living with people that I realized how wonderful it is to interact with others.
Although my roommates have different personalities, they have many similar interests. They all like watching TikTok and playing Honor of Kings. It was through them that I was exposed to some TikTok content. Before that, my impression of TikTok was limited to occasionally coming across some cringey video compilations and some funny comments. Of course, I also understand that these contents cannot fully represent TikTok, but I didn't want to explore it myself because I was a bit resistant to short videos.
I won't talk about how popular and addictive short videos are. Sometimes I would watch their TikTok feeds, and after a while, I realized some interesting points:
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Unprepared reception. What does it mean to be prepared for reception? Browsing the covers and titles on the homepage of YouTube is a form of preparation. Before you click on a video, you assume that the title is not clickbait or meaningless nonsense, and you have a certain level of mental preparation for the content you are about to receive. On TikTok, unless you are searching, the feed on the homepage only recommends one video at a time, and the video starts playing immediately. This means that every time your brain swipes, it has to quickly understand the content of the video, which is very tiring and inefficient for me.
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Strange recommendations. In most of the TikToks I've seen, their content is diverse. It could be lifestyle videos, educational short films, movie explanations, unboxing videos, borderline softcore content, game highlights, and so on. I completely don't understand what each person's preferences are. I often complain about the poor recommendations on Bilibili, but at least I can understand what someone likes to watch based on the recommendations on their homepage—I can find one or several themes. On TikTok, users can watch anything and everything, and it seems that they don't have any requirements for what they want to see.
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TikTok's unique content format. TikTok has a lot of text-to-speech (TTS) videos, and movie explanations always have that storyteller's voice. Daily videos often have a guy with a punchable voice. There are also popular family members who are famous for who knows what, frequently edited "TikTok versions" of music, various editing techniques and effects, and so on. It can be said that TikTok has its own unique style of content. Whether you like it or not is a matter of personal preference, and I personally don't quite understand it.
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Butchered music and obsession with sharing. TikTok, of course, has music. And there is a lot of music on TikTok. However, most of the time, you only hear a small portion of the music, and many videos use the same music. Once you start rapidly swiping through videos, it becomes extremely mentally exhausting. We often hear some radio edits of songs, but these edits should at least follow a logical structure. On TikTok, most of the music only includes the climax of a certain part, and these parts often have various versions. For example, the opening theme of the anime "Ling Ring" was popular before, and I could always hear it in my dorm room, but now the slow + reverb trend is popular again. For me, this is a very disrespectful behavior towards music. The purpose of music is to provide an experience, just like reading books or watching videos. Everything needs to have a buildup. But cutting music into fragments will completely destroy the impression of the song in people's minds. If you only leave the climax of a trance song, you might feel great, but without the buildup, you will quickly get bored. However, the reason why this behavior can be tolerated for so long is simply because not many people care about music.
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Fragmented completeness. Because of TikTok's unique presentation style, users can only obtain countless fragments of information most of the time. After all, you can't expect a video that is less than 3 minutes long to have any completeness. This kind of information can entertain the brain continuously, but afterwards, we cannot recall the themes we have experienced in detail. You can only remember that you scrolled through TikTok, but you can't remember what you scrolled through. Of course, this phenomenon exists on various internet platforms, but short video platforms undoubtedly have the most severe case. Generally speaking, the long videos I see on TikTok are movie explanations. These explanations themselves break down a complete experience according to the creator's will. There are also occasional snippets of TV dramas. I often see my roommates randomly watching random clips from random movies or TV shows, sometimes even sped up and accompanied by some strange "DJ music". This fragmentation of completeness is also one of the reasons why I dislike short videos.
As someone who has hardly watched short videos (except occasionally on Bilibili), the various attributes of short videos are very difficult for me to understand. This extremely fast-paced information is not suitable for my brain. I feel like I'm already a slow-reacting person, and my intelligence is also declining. I'd better avoid these things as much as possible. Occasionally, I can find something interesting on their TikToks, but because our interests are so different, I can't understand most of the things. I have also played TikTok for a while, created an account and only watched softcore content, to be honest, it was quite interesting, but it still doesn't compare to the uniqueness of Twitter.
I don't know how many people in xlog use TikTok, maybe you can tell me what's fun about TikTok.