Since this forum brings out my inner contrarian, I feel compelled to defend TikTok. I can’t really argue with OP’s assessment of the manipulation built into the UX, but the rest misses the point. The point is the culture on TT is amazing. It’s format and anti-features may have something to do with it, or maybe it’s just the people and the momentum they set. It’s a place where polish isn’t expected, where the most popular content is just silly, unedited, and endearing. You’re more likely to see a person laying in bed with poor lighting than a studio. Their strict comment character count, terrible threading, lack of ability to browse user’s comment history, and no cumulative comment likes count all add up to an ephemeral stream of the tightest and cleverest showing up first. It’s stitch, duet, and video response features turn short form videos into a conversation, and I’ve enjoyed traversing many of such asynchronous dialogs. It’s a powerful authoring platform; it’s inline editing, face tracking filters, and media library make it so easy to make polished content. And it’s (musical.ly’s) original innovation of letting creators reuse each other’s sounds has had majestic results. Users can click on a sound and see dozens to thousands of different takes around the same audio; it’s exhilarating to see real diversity and iteration unfold around the same source material.

I disagree that the format is not educational. It has 3-10 min videos which are often richly packed with content and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from historians, reporters, scientists, and enthusiasts. I tend to bounce out to my browser a lot to dig deeper into a subject that I get tipped off about on TikTok.

The infamous FYP algorithm is its most popular and controversial feature. It’s a massive neutral net that tracks an insane amount of parameters, many of which you can only get with a video-feed-only platform. It’s been found to be effective at informally clustering people around medical conditions, sexual and political orientations, and more. It’s power of suggestion is terrifying. I’ve noticed a bias towards the more extreme left-wing views, perhaps as an antidote to YouTube’s alt-right pipeline, perhaps in as a subversive pro-CCP thrust. It’s easy to become entranced in a session and not realize that a post or series of them may have been fed with intent to influence a particular subject.

I’m still looking for the self-hosted, democratized antidote to TikTok; it’s just that it’s raised the bar so high for platform tools and spawned so many parasocial relationships that it feels insurmountable at times.

I would be remiss to not share some content. This video gave me a great chuckle today. Quintessential American TikTok humor, it’s a whole journey:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevmRy/

Here is a creator that does a lot of conversational content. He talks about philosophy, category theory, his apartment decor, and queer aesthetic. This kind of eclecticism is mostly normal, and very different than YouTube’s highly thematic channels.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevgky/

Finally, here is one of the news creators I follow. There are many wonderfully talented reporters that bring their own color. This one keeps it really straight: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUdRMLT/?k=1