Why is TikTok successful?
the story of the app that went viral making viral content
A couple of weeks back I wrote about PUBG, the famous first-person-shooter game that got banned in India. Today, I wanted to explore the design behind another app that got banned even before PUBG, TikTok.
TikTok doesn’t need any introduction. This short-video-format social media giant filled the gaping void that Vine left behind. Until today, there’s no one single specific reason why Vine was shut down by Twitter. Some say it was because the founders left, and some say it was due to Snapchat allowing 10 second videos to be uploaded and posted publicly. Vine shutting down left a big void that was left unfilled by any of the global social media giants. Until, TikTok came onto the stage; and did so many more things in better ways.
But to truly understand the success of TikTok, we need to see what Vine did to the social media world and how it differentiated itself from other video sharing services like YouTube.
What was Vine?
Vine was the first short-form-video app that launched in the early 2010s and ultimately shut down in 2016 by Twitter which acquired the app along with its founders. Vine allowed people to record and upload 6-second videos and it looped infinitely like GIFs. While most would think the 6 second constraint would make it hard for users, it was precisely the reason for its massive success, at a point boasting over 200 million active users on the platform. Let’s break down the user-experience design in Vine.
The 6-seconds constraint:
The constraint and the loop actually encouraged people to treat it as a challenge and try to create interesting content. Short animations, silly dance movies, things which look great only when looped were all a part of what made Vine so great. The looping feature eventually ended up in Instagram video uploads and also TikTok.
Pandering to the very short attention span:
During the time that Vine became popular, social media usage across the world was on the rise because more people started getting smartphones and people understood that social media was a great way to connect with people/things across the world. With so many apps and so much content being shoved into a person’s brain, the greed to keep learning and seeing more increased. This ultimately led people to judge content far too quickly and dismiss it if it doesn’t pander to their interests; because they believed they could always find more interesting content just by scrolling a little further. Thus people began spending increasingly less time on a particular piece of information (a piece of writing, photo, video, etc.,). And Vine fit into this model perfectly. With content only lasting 6 Seconds.
Be silly. Nonsense is welcome too:
YouTube, and a few other video sharing platforms developed into something that were very different than what they were created for. YouTube, specifically, began shaping up to a video content sharing service where only quality content was being rewarded. And, this upped the ante in the platform. YouTube became a platform that created celebrities out of people who made their content great visually or entertaining or both. To elaborate on the entertaining part, it focused on being informative, and of value to the user. It became a music-video sharing service for artists. Trailers/Promos sharing platform for production houses. A pseudo-network that could host shows for others. It became a platform where you could find videos for hours and a few minutes too. In summary, YouTube became serious business. Silly content rarely went viral.
So, Snapchat did its best to cater to the short-form-video segment, but Snapchat was primarily a communication app and not a content-discovery platform. Vine encouraged people to be silly. The content didn’t need to make sense. It only needed to be visually entertaining. Finally, a platform for normies rather than professional people with high-end equipment. Vine allowed people to engage with short entertaining content and kept them hooked. Mind you, Instagram could’ve been in the game by then but they were far too slow in adopting videos. Vine created all these beautiful dimensions to media consumption and vanished. Luckily for TikTok.
The rise of TikTok
So, TikTok merely needed to repeat the factors that made Vine such a big success. It did that and more with a few more brilliant touches. Let’s explore those user experience design aspects of TikTok.
Acing the length of the time:
Vine had 6 seconds. But, TikTok did 15 seconds. This number was very successful. While 6 seconds was great too, 15 seconds gave a little more leeway. Wasn’t too long or short. Just about perfect.
Encourage remixing:
Giving credit where it’s due, Musical.ly was the first app to do this on a big scale. While usage of audio tracks and music from other prominent media sources like songs, comedy tracks and movies were frowned upon, and even thought of as plagiarism on platforms like YouTube, Musical.ly encouraged this. So, people now could just pretend they’re singing it while just acting, or dance to it or make it hilarious. TikTok not only followed suit by providing this feature but also ended up buying Musical.ly. So, they eliminated their greatest competitor. And, other social media giants were only slowly beginning to see the value behind this new format.
Be Sillier with TikTok:
This Remixing was further enabled by the wide and easy-to-learn editing features that TikTok offered. People could make really good looking content with minimal efforts. A big problem with platforms like YouTube is the necessity of editing and all the other near-professional requirements a person had to fulfill to put a video up there. TikTok (Vine and Musical.ly too) had this in-built.
This was done previously in another way. Remember how Instagram initially became popular because of its photo filters?
Letting people go viral:
While using hashtags was the only way to get famous on platforms like Instagram and Twitter, TikTok actually had a separate section for you to just explore new content besides the people you follow. A similar feature to the rarely-used Explore section on Instagram. So, people who created content could have a greater reach. A much wider reach than what any other platform offered. And, it did this with the help of something that was not so widely present during the time of Vine….
A powerful AI curation engine:
Other platforms used AI too, but the TikTok algorithm has repeatedly been lauded for its curation ability. The exploring section measured your view time on a particular thing, whether you reacted to it, whether you saved/shared it, and a lot of other factors to curate the next video for you. While the specifics of how it does this is unknown, the result has been phenomenal.
Last, but not the least,
Penetrating other apps:
To go truly viral, both the artist and the platform, staying inside TikTok alone wasn’t enough. And, TikTok learnt this quick. While platforms like IG and Snapchat don’t allow you to cross-share your content natively from the app to other platforms, TikTok encouraged that. Make a video on TikTok, download or directly share it from the app onto other apps. People who didn’t have the app could still see your work, and also be intrigued enough to download TikTok and explore it.
With a love mix of these user experience design innovations, TikTok grew the market to an unimaginable size along with the app. So much so, that the other social media giants are now scrambling to come up with their versions of TikTok. Such as Reels from Instagram, Lasso from Facebook (didn’t release widely or was shelved, I think), Shorts from YouTube to name a few. And, a few more local homemade apps like Roposo also made their mark.
