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by drusepth 1059 days ago
You can scroll through the "Discover" tab which has depersonalized trends across the whole app. I just took a quick scroll through and it seems like at least ~5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen. There's been at least a few recent trends over the past few weeks that have been almost entirely text (beige flags, all the greenscreen text trends, #groupchat, etc).

Anecdotally, I also see clusters of text-only posts every few weeks, even though I always either pause to read or scroll immediately through.

1 comments

I would argue that "5-10% of videos trending right now have text that take up >50% of the screen" is a huge moving of the goal post from the original claim in this sub-thread: "just computer generated voices reading screenshots of funny tweets and reddit comments".

I definitely used to get videos with walls of text that are obviously trying to game the algorithm by getting you to read an essay to increase watch time. Once I habitually scrolled away from them I stopped getting them. That isn't even related to the claim of voices reading screenshots of tweets or reddit comments.

I absolutely believe that videos exist where there are text-to-speech readings of tweets or reddit comments and that the commenter referencing them sees a decent amount of them in their own feed. But I do not believe they represent a "decent amount" of the majority of TikTok users feeds.

I guess it depends on what you consider a "decent amount". Within the overall context of whether text posts would be popular or not on TikTok, 5-10% of globally-trending posts being text-heavy seemed like a decent amount to me but YMMV.

But, you are right that I was talking about text posts in general rather than directly responding to the videos about reading text from reddit/twitter that this subthread was discussing though. I see those often but I don't see them currently trending.