Tiktok is the worst of the brain-rotting social media products our world has produced, and that's saying a lot.<p>I spent many years in the early days of social media building: starting at StumbleUpon, working on early Facebook apps, building companies in the space. It always felt that social media was an unstoppable train, but it seems like the benefits of connecting everyone together outweighed the negatives: the constant address book spamming, content designed to be viral rather than informative, etc.<p>I suppose that's it's really just the distilled, pure dopamine lever part of all the early stuff we built with everything else stripped out. It was always inevitable that the culture of optimization would strip out the humanity, I suppose.<p>EDIT: The replies to this comment really have an "I'm not addicted, you just don't understand it" vibe.
"If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are you’ve stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll one night this summer." I think this shows the TikTok algorithm makes things look more ubiquitous then they really are, I've never seen anything like this, and half the time when I mention what seems to me to be a big meme like demure and mindful to someone else i know whose on TikTok they'll have no idea what I'm talking about.
If you like this article, it's written by Ryan Broderick the guy behind Garbage Day, a newsletter I can't recommend highly enough if you spend rather too much time online:<p><a href="https://www.garbageday.email/" rel="nofollow">https://www.garbageday.email/</a>
As someone who's watched tons of these videos, now I know!<p>I've always wanted to try the software, too bad the author never tracked it down.
Let's get serious for a second here. You have to be a complete braindead zombie to find those videos entertaining. I can't believe anybody is wasting their time on these.