TikTok: C or D

?eah, ?eah, ?eah, I left that extra part in post haste.

No one is doing TikTok like him pic.twitter.com/TpjcGovjKX

— Kalhan (@KalhanR) March 18, 2021

i like the sea shanty video.

however.

the platform is mostly dystopian, as are the instagram "reels." most videos are autobiographical and self-commodifying -- people commenting on their personal life, their relationships, etc, but in a way that burnishes a curated image. so far so predictable. sometimes they are selling a product or have a cashapp in their bio or whatever.

what's weird is the way the users do so, usually recreating some kind of popular meme. they turn themselves not just into a commodity, but into a very dumb meme. and they draw their pets and family members into it. like they're all cartoon people, living out a slapstick existence. the most terrifying of these videos involve that robot-voice narration.

it's like, if adorno wrote a dystopian novel, this would be what people were doing all day in his version of 2021.

i've got a video for you treeship

https://www.tiktok.com/@geezyunit/video/6947387987659443461

ok, that's pretty good.

my usually social media-illiterate became obsessed with tiktok over the past year and now i can't send videos of my cats to the family gc for fear that she'll turn them into videos with stuff dubbed over them. she's getting to a point where she sees everything as fodder and she's addicted to getting views. she and my dad keep guilting me and my brother for not liking her videos and we keep having to explain that you need to have an account to do that

social media-illiterate MOM**** became etc

am also about 90% certain that she's going to end up in a cult as she's already shown an inclination towards some of the culty new age grifters - she was already prone to that stuff before stepping into a social media platform that shoves it in her face

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdqJj29q/

I’m not interested in your hot takes about Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/djBOCs1pR2

— Patrick J Loller (@PatrickLoller) August 16, 2021

this cadence is like having a needle shoved into your eardrum repeatedly

tiktok is where you get to listen to the world's most obnoxious twitter accounts recite their tweets in the exact cadence you always imagined they would use

Not sure why the perpetrator of that TikTok thought that adopting the persona of Howdy Doody would lend credence to his views about foreign policy and military interventionism.

More of this, less of blandly attractive people lip syncing

https://www.tiktok.com/@hendersizzle/video/7001618935770615045

im on this now, and i am single-handedly saving it from itself

Okay, a buddy's kid was recently caught (or involved with) ripping a soap dispenser off the wall in the school bathroom (he denies having anything to do with it). I thought it was sort of an odd, kind of old-fashioned form of juvenile delinquency, something you might see in a 1981 after school special, or Seven Green Bottles.

But no, it's a tiktok challenge! And it's sweeping the nation: ...the goal of a new trend, the "Deviant Licks" TikTok challenge, is to either damage school property or steal items and post videos of it online in an attempt to go viral.

This includes vandalizing bathrooms, cutting up books, etc.

Sorry if I'm the last person on the planet to know about this.. I feel old

Furthermore, I question the wisdom of posting evidence of these crimes online, but what do I know

be gay
do crimes
post about them
online

Do you see the perpetrator?
Yeah I’m right here.

this is pretty good: In the video, the voice over the intercom said they don’t have the resources to call each of their parents to tell them what’s been happening, so the “only recourse they have” is to remove the doors from the hinges in both the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms.

My worst possible nightmare as a kid

lol Andy i don’t know where that’s from but the whole thing sounds like a pretty elaborate wind-up

even if it’s true, if it wasn’t tiktok kids would find other reasons to be idiots. i think you were right at the beginning: it’s a tale as old as time. i have a 12-yo who’s a bit of an idiot and even he would know that doing this kind of thing for the likes is moronic

No, it's a thing. It's called "devious licks," and it started with just swiping random things from school, like boxes of masks, and displaying them on TikTok. Vandalizing bathrooms was September's "challenge" so we did have a lot of people trashing the bathrooms at my school. My guess is it's fading out now, though, because the next set of challenges issued involved actual physical assault and most kids aren't dumb enough to slap their teachers and put it on TikTok.

Lily and Andy are right, but so is Tracer. If it wasn't #deviouslicks, there'd be another excuse.

Yes, school vandalism is as old of time; but voluntarily posting incriminating evidence online seems purely 21st Century.

Apparently tiktok has started pulling all the videos anyway, which may help explain why the phenomenon is fading

if it's a no bones day, i vandalize a junior high restroom

The rabbit hole of this one user claiming Ancient Rome did not exist and all the answers from academia is pure entertainment.

Just found out recently that my neighbours kid is a tik tok star with like two million follows.

Most of this shit is just made up, right? The pranks, pratfalls and funniest home video BS? Like the kids are all just pretending something went wrong and planned it?

And ones like that "devious licks" upthread - someone started that a joke Tide Pods style to see what would happen, right? Tell me people arent actively this much Darwin Awards material.

devious licks is an actual thing but the note upthread that if it weren't this it would be something else is 100% accurate as well

New D&D player: so the one I really don’t understand is “chaotic good?” Like what does that even look like…

Me: I gotchu https://t.co/EH8oNjVbcO

— Rusty Foster (@fka_tabs) May 12, 2022

That is amazing.

the duddest
https://www.stereogum.com/2187634/halsey-tiktok-viral-song/news/

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/health/sexual-health/a40938627/what-is-vabbing/

● Washing your hands both before and after

● Not allowing areas you’ve ‘vabbed’ to touch anything or anyone

● Wiping down gym equipment before and after use

● Making sure you get checked by a professional if you think you sense an unusual or bad odour

TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-63213567

"vabbing"

The wisdom of the ancients alive today

this overlong essay on the "enshittification" of TikTok makes a good case for the vicious cycle of social media

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Hmm

I wrote about the unhinged therapists making videos about their clients on TikTok, and how social media has smoothed over the ethical issues of certain professions turning their jobs into content https://t.co/u6kflar9NN

— Sarah Manavis (@sarahmanavis) January 26, 2023

Pretty incredible way for so-called professionals to behave.

First time I heard of this was a therapist bitching online about a client "traumadumping" on her. What did she think her job was.

Hey GUYYYYYYYS it's ziggy here back again from VIENNA y'heard and you are NOT GONNA BELIEVE who this crazy bitch I'm seeing thinks she wants to fuck

TikTok has insane energy, the Four Loko of social media.

whats going on over there

What in the fuck is this shit pic.twitter.com/YTABQF81mP

— Rascal ✝️ (@PeakRascal) July 27, 2023

There is no single app I’d like to crash and burn horribly more than tiktok.

jfc when i look at tiktok it's all classic video games, vintage audio gear and some DIY home improvement stuff mixed in.

three quarters of my instagram ads look like that AI scam shit

anyone got a playlist of semi obscure old songs whose play count has skyrocketed due to tiktok? (thinking boa’s “duvet”, pavement’s “harness your hopes”, duster, lwb etc)

there’s this Songs that became famous because of a system glitch

Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous "Letter to America," in which he explained why he attacked the United States.

The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and… pic.twitter.com/EwjiGtFEE3

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 16, 2023

this is what weve been working for all these years

lol

What is happening to the brain as it tries to process all the information in a sludge video?

Brain activity in response to sludge content hasn’t been studied directly, but experts say such content likely has similar effects on the brain as multitasking.

Guess this means those tv channels (like cp24) with a traffic cam, weather updates, stock ticker, news ticker, newsreel and sports results are proto-sludge...

I thought this was going to be about those videos where a guy picks up a hammer and it digitally sludges into a popsicle.

what is the legal basis for congress banning tiktok? i mean i don't dispute that is foreign-owned and bad for americans, but so is fox news, which i'm pretty sure they could not get away with banning

Very funny.

https://youmayalsolike.beehiiv.com/p/donghua-jinglong-glycine

as i am not signed up (timethief concerns) my intermittent guide to super-weird tiktok is twitter-user @nudeobama aka "pikachu headpat girl": she has set her alg to an insane pitch of excellence (esp. if you appreciate hyperrealistic latex skinsuit guys)*

*(i beg you never appreciate this)

I love Tiktok but you have to curate your algo.

thanks for that link!