It's hard to believe anything of real value can be communicated in such a constrained format, but would you care to share any tiktoks that are actually worth risking a hugely time-wasting addiction for?
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).
> It's hard to believe anything of real value can be communicated in such a constrained format
This is exactly what I've always hated about Twitter. Its length-limited posts actively stimulate stupid crap like people posting what they had for dinner and make real insightful content very hard to read because people have to split it up in 20 different parts which all become their own threads with distracting replies.
Even the sane people I followed posted so much nonsense I had to wade through to find the one pearl that it was just not worth it. If something good comes up it'll make it to HN anyway so I just left Twitter.
I really don't get why Twitter is so popular either but I guess like with TikTok most people like shallow content. See what's popular on TV too, it's the "reality"/celeb crap.
