TikTok: The app that has us hooked
By Nic Tamayo
The original version of the once-popular social media network Musical.ly launched in August 2014. Like other content platforms in the 2010s, Musical.ly’s videos were considered short-form content. While Vine was primarily known for creating short comedy videos and Snapchat was used to send temporary pictures and videos to friends, Musical.ly was used to create short lip sync videos.
However, one major flaw that Musical.ly faced was its lack of popularity among young adults. Many high school and college-aged social media goers thought of Musical.ly as an app for children. This stigma surrounding the app made it “uncool” for these users. There was a certain shame that went along with creating Musical.ly videos.
Even so, the app’s popularity continued to grow, and stars like Jacob Sartorius and Baby Ariel were created. The potential of popularity and stardom that this app offered is part of the reason why the Chinese company “ByteDance” decided to purchase Musical.ly in 2017. In mid-2018, ByteDance decided to close the Musical.ly streaming platform; however, rather than shut down all of Musical.ly’s user accounts, they decided to transfer those users to another ByteDance owned platform.
Douyin was launched by ByteDance in September 2016 in China. Douyin was an app created to occupy the same space as Muscial.ly in the Chinese and Thai markets. After ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, the decision was made to combine the two platforms under the brand name “TikTok.”
Since then, TikTok has seen exponential growth–in monthly active users and content creation. By January 2021, TikTok had nearly 689 million monthly active users worldwide. While it still lags behind media streaming competitors like YouTube, it ranks ninth among all social media platforms in terms of the percentage of Americans that use the app, according to a Pew Research Center Study.
Musical.ly’s lip-syncing video format was still very present throughout the app, but TikTok had evolved the concept. Rather than using quick, 2x speed motions in their videos, users created new camera transitions and dances to go along with the music they lip-synced to.
In March of 2020, COVID-19 was declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization. As a two-week spring break grew into a multi-month-long lockdown, everyone was looking for a way to pass the time. Many turned to TikTok for this solace.
They scrolled through hours of lip-syncing and dance videos but soon began to notice different types of content emerging on the platform. Creators had begun to use TikTok’s short-form video system to create how-to videos, comedy skits and day-in-the-life videos. Those who witnessed this evolution will remember trends like whipped coffee and people like the paradise bartender at the beginning of lockdown.
Users continued to interact with these videos, and the TikTok algorithm continued to boost these types of videos. As lockdown continued, the “For You” pages—a main hub of TikTok recommended videos—that appeared on a user’s profile continued to evolve from the standard dance TikToks to more informational, comedic and interesting TikToks.
With time, communities on the TikTok platform began to develop. The main dividing line that has been established within the TikTok community is between “straight TikTok” and “alt TikTok.”
Straight TikTok describes users who interact with the aforementioned lip-sync and dance videos that the platform was originally known for. Alt TikTok describes a community of users that interact with other forms of content (the alternative to the dancing videos). Within each main group, there are smaller categories that have continued to evolve. For example, the term “cottagecore TikTok” is used to describe a group of users who interact with content that aestheticizes a western agricultural lifestyle.
Through the summer of 2020, these sub-communities continued to grow. People were introduced to political movements like Black Lives Matter through independent creators. Others watched disturbing “alt” TikToks. These short videos often featured distorted videos and distorted audios that created a sense of uneasiness. Users continued to feed the TikTok algorithm more information about themselves and, in turn, the algorithm continued to supply them with content suited to their tastes.
Since TikTok has evolved into a personalized short-form content streaming platform, more people have spent time on the platform. Around the end of 2020, screen times hit all-time highs as users scrolled through their TikTok “For You” pages for hours at a time.
Today, TikTok has become an extremely popular social media network that 48% of young adults aged 18-29 use, according to a Pew Research Center study. Like Musical.ly, it has created social media stars like Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae and Bella Poarch. However, unlike its predecessor, TikTok has developed a way to make the app appealing to all generations. A Pew Research Center study shows that the number of adults aged 30-64 has been steadily increasing since 2019. It’s now considered strange that some people aren’t in the loop that is TikTok.
TikTok has been able to keep audiences hooked to its platform, and all signs indicate a continuation of this pattern.
