Just out of curiosity, how would you build a following if none of your videos ever receives any views? I'm not someone who uses the tikity tok but it seems like an intractable problem.
Leave noteworthy comments on other peoples videos, make noteworthy stitches of theirs. Embrace remix culture, essentially. It only seems like an intractable problem to non power users of social media.
If those videos receive no views, then it means the concept of the stitch wasn't compelling. Practically speaking -- just do it over and over again until you find something that does work.
Some people have a knack for making content that goes viral, but for most folks, it's a muscle that needs to be learned through lots of practice, with a lot of early going seemingly bearing little fruit until the inflection point is reached.
The problem is that "getting people to see your stuff" is the route to monetization, and therefore is horribly choked with spam that stacks the odds against real humans.
I think at least initially TikTok would push traffic to new accounts. My first few videos got a bunch of likes/views even though I had 0 followers. And then I noticed it started to trickle down video after video even though (subjectively) the content remained largely the same. It’s a clever mechanism to increase stickiness for new users as well as detect early on if a new content producer has that Good Shit that will do mega views.
No, on a regular account TikTok's algorithm will always send a few dozen viewers to any new video or any LIVE just to get feedback from users (e.g. playtime, likes, faves, shares etc).
I have an old account with almost 4000 followers.
TikTok just woke up one day and hated me. Hopefully it has a timeout on it.