Yeah this is what’s most sad about tiktok to me. It’s a great new format for media, but it allows, or is especially susceptible to, attractive people putting their goods on display and teasing their viewers. Some days it feels like tiktok promotes and validates this behavior, and other days it feels like the technology just scales up high school popularity dynamics and isn't really anything new. So does the tech drive the algorithm or do the users?
Youtube doesn't particularly have this type of problem, for example. It has others, sure, but the core content it breeds is not shorts of high schoolers in their bedroom dancing in their underwear. Snapchat and sending that content privately was one thing but now tiktok validates that behavior with a public audience. And then onlyfans exists to graduate your content and monetize your body directly. I’m pretty sex-positive so it’s not that I’m turned off by the concept of people wielding sexual power in society or making money off their body. But I’m not sure what society looks like when that’s the highlighted path for 16 year old girls to replicate in order to make life changing money or be immensely popular as their own brand in their 20s.
Back to the youtube example: on youtube it seems the content is important because you have to engage for more than 30s whereas on tiktok it feels like you’re following personal brands and the utility of the content is almost irrelevant.
Youtube doesn't particularly have this type of problem, for example. It has others, sure, but the core content it breeds is not shorts of high schoolers in their bedroom dancing in their underwear. Snapchat and sending that content privately was one thing but now tiktok validates that behavior with a public audience. And then onlyfans exists to graduate your content and monetize your body directly. I’m pretty sex-positive so it’s not that I’m turned off by the concept of people wielding sexual power in society or making money off their body. But I’m not sure what society looks like when that’s the highlighted path for 16 year old girls to replicate in order to make life changing money or be immensely popular as their own brand in their 20s.
Back to the youtube example: on youtube it seems the content is important because you have to engage for more than 30s whereas on tiktok it feels like you’re following personal brands and the utility of the content is almost irrelevant.