[dopeboy]

Yes, absolutely. In fact I was just emailing some childhood friends these videos earlier today.

What TikTok does _really_ well is surface hyper specific content to you. I grew up the children of indian immigrants and there's a, let's say shared trauma, to growing up like that. It's a ton of little things that I just swallowed as a kid and now I realize: that's kinda messed up. Things like aunties always asking me what school I got into, am I dating, am I getting married, etc. They seem like innocent questions right now but as the eldest teen in the group, I wanted appreciation and felt like I was getting orders from these questions.

Yes it's a constrained format (though I think you can up to 90 seconds now) but you have to realize, it is near impossible to find this kind of content elsewhere. There's a whole generation of people who find communicating through short video clips more natural than how you and I are talking right now. And they're not afraid to challenge social norms that I had to accept; I can only salute that.

Does this represent all the type of content I engage with? No - the slot machine effect is very real here. For every impactful video I watch, there's maybe 10 dopamine hit videos I consume. I choose to make that trade off (with guard rails - I install TikTok every friday and delete it every Sunday).

Sample impactful video: https://www.tiktok.com/@anncytwinklee/video/7130719838778953...