TikTok Of The Town
Time Will Crawl
How is it that there are 366 days in 2020, the same number of days in any leap year, yet it feels like one of the longest years ever? Time slowed to a crawl despite all the distractions during the circuit-breaker and post-lockdown: Twitch, Valorant, GTAV, Among Us, TikTok…
Oh yeah! TikTok. Weirdly enough, that was a minor revelation for me this year.
One thing that I take pride in as a social media producer is being on top of trends and finding my own niche in every corner of the landscape. However, I’ve never fully engaged with TikTok despite downloading it pretty early on. To me, it was merely a clone of Vine (RIP you were too beautiful for this world), a great video-sharing app didn’t last long enough to live up to its hype.
I wonder to myself while scrolling through the endless stream of the app’s For You Page — what’s so special about TikTok that has enabled it to succeed Vine’s reign and outlast it?
The Spice Must Flow
I’ll tell you: it’s the sheer chaotic variety.
If variety is the spice of life, then TikTok is the spiciest spice that ever spiced. It’s not something that you could (should?) watch 2 straight hours like a movie (unless you’re extremely bored or stuck in a room with absolutely nothing else to do I guess) but taken 5 or 10 minutes at a time, it’s the perfect burst of humour and energy that acts like the proverbial happy pills we all need.
Whereas Vine users creatively used its 6–7 second looped format to great effect, TikTok has always had a more generous time limit from its inception. Recently the max length was increased from 15 to 60 seconds, allowing for even greater freedom in content creation.
Short =/= Sweet
Case in point, this video: https://www.tiktok.com/@chunkysdead/video/6901715897812143366
Now if this was on Vine, the joke would proceed from setup (it’s an apartment tour!) to the punchline (shower off blood!) at breakneck speed and without all the lovely asides in between. The video would probably be more in-your-face and there’d be another Viner lying in the shower as a sight gag. There’d be shouting and dramatic music before it loops again.
On TikTok however, the humour is allowed to breathe and build up such that the viewer is led down the garden path to believing that Melissa a.k.a. @chunkysdead is sincerely giving a tour of her crib. First, she glibly drops a comment about storing dead bodies in her fridge before making references to the avian stains on her window, the disturbing phallic Elmo on her bed, and finally circling back to her earlier setup by pointing out the shower where she washes the blood off.
To put a bow on it, she deadpans about not being able to afford the apartment since losing her job. That’s a #relatable moment if I’ve ever seen one.
I’ll Do Anything For You (Page)
Now when you think about how this is just 1 short clip in a potentially never-ending parade of clips that is TikTok’s algorithmically-customised For You Page, it’s no wonder that the app went into interstellar overdrive after the world was sent into solitary confinement. I think we were all looking for something, anything, to take our minds off things, especially if it could serve laughs and start the familiar endorphin drip feed our bodies crave.
Previously it was thought of — ‘sneered at’ might be more accurate — as a mindless Gen Z app where memes live and die in a matter of hours. Personally, I feel like if that’s your experience on TikTok, you gotta shoulder most of the blame for being so boring that TikTok can’t figure out anything entertaining to serve up to you. It just takes a moment of scrolling through and liking a few clips here and there before ByteDance’s scarily pinpoint algorithm determines the best videos to capture your attention and keep you scrolling.
Loop The Loop
Once the possibilities of TikTok clicked in my mind, I started testing out some ideas I had at the beginning of November. I don’t have @yoleendadong’s preternatural ability to be so comfortable looking silly in front of the camera, so I defaulted to the old standby: FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD. My first TikTok of sliced beef noodles was blessed by the machine gods of algorithm and has 70k views and counting. The next video performed even better, with more than twice the views.
Surely I am on my way to TikTok immortality now?!
The next few videos fell short of the engagement that my first 2 clips got, so I tried other ideas like local IG spots, Instagrammable desserts, etc. I’m one month into this grand TikTok experiment now and I can honestly say I have a gut instinct about what goes viral but can’t explain it in words. Being obvious and shooting a TikTok about the hottest thing of the moment like Queen’s Gambit is NOT a surefire way of elbowing your way to the top of the FYP. A random idea I had about doing a video about my favorite Yakult drink will suddenly be showered with 250,000 views.
So here I am trying to find a method to the madness, while still getting served my periodic dose of chaotic happiness by ByteDance’s code chefs. While the end of 2020 is in sight, I don’t think I’ll stop immersing myself in the sometimes impenetrable meme culture that is TikTok once the new year rolls around. In the meantime, you can boost my TikTok views over at https://www.tiktok.com/@khairulazmas
