What is Actually Up with Social Media | Let's 'tok' about TikTok and how we're ALL watching it

First things first, tell me if I’m the only person experiencing this

I’m sitting in my room, scrolling through Instagram's explore page, seeing makeup tutorials and Food ASMR videos (admit it, you’ve done this), the next thing I know I’m seeing TikTok of people with my sister ( who btw has joined TikTok now after me begging her not to), and laughing at their stupidity, and shocked at their fame.

I’m sure all of us have seen a TikTok video, you might have not searched it, or installed the App, you might not even know what a TikTok is, but you’ve definitely seen a TikTok.

It’s everywhere from YouTube compilations, to facebook videos, to twitter retweets, to Instagram models, or even on WhatsApp, which of course has been sent to you in your family group.

Are you wondering which laboratory was this monster made in?

Its history begins in 2014 with an app called Musical.ly. Musical.ly was an app launched by two Chinese entrepreneurs, it was created as a simple lip-syncing video platform. Fast forward to 2017 and Musical.ly was acquired by Beijing tech company ByteDance for around the US $1 billion. At the time, ByteDance already owned a version of TikTok and following the acquisition, merged it with Musical.ly, creating a more complete lip-syncing platform. 

As of 2019, ByteDance has been estimated to be worth more than the US $75 billion according to Bloomberg

Following the closure of Vine in 2016, a similar short-video creation app, many of the famous names established on Vine, either migrated to YouTube or TikTok as their latest platform. With Vine dying out, a void was created for short-videos, which TikTok managed to fill. The percentage of 18-24-year-olds using Vine was around 28.1% within its 200 million monthly users. 

Now comes the main question, how and why did this become so big?

I think to best understand Tik Tok you have to understand and look at it in the context of its predecessors - Musically & Vine.

Vine started the trend of letting people make just small 6 second videos. Of course, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc all existed before Vine, but Vine was really the tipping point for short videos (< 6s). You can view Musically as almost an extension of Vine, in that it allowed most of the same behavior, but it added this new feature of lip-syncing (not gonna lie I did this too). This feature was what made it take off, as it really decreased the barrier to entry and every Tom, Dick, and Harry were trying their hand at lip-syncing.

For a Vine to be "good" you both needed to have a good idea and good execution. Musically changed this because of course a good idea and execution are important, the lip-syncing feature made it easy to make videos in Musically. This, I think is super important. 

Tik Tok is this same principle but taken to the next level. 

So there can still exist high-quality Tik Toks with unique ideas and good execution (yes, sure), but there also exists medium to bad quality Tik Toks of people lip-syncing songs. And on top of that Tik Tok has unique features that add camera filters and easy editing tricks that even further reduces the barrier to content creation. I think this is at the heart of Tik Tok's success and their growth strategy - their ability to continuously grow the base of people that can create content. You can join a dare-like challenge, or participate in a dance meme, or make a joke. Or you can make fun of all of these things.

So the reason Tik Tok stays successful is not that their content is super high quality and curated, but because there is a demand by people (particularly young people) to be able to make this type of content.

In a world of four-second attention spans, the Tiktok usability is very welcomed (clearly).

It’s been a while since a new social app got so big, so quick. It’s even made the non-users watch it, even if they’re making fun of it, let’s face it they enjoy it (guilty af)

So, here’s the funniest part

“TikTok scored 188 million downloads, with India accounting for 47% of them, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.”

I’m not even 1% surprised. 

It’s the same reason why Dhinchak Pooja became famous while we have such great performers in our country. People are seeking for any kind of entertainment, and are finding ways to do it, especially since living in the 21st century is very stressful. So, people watch these weird videos/ Bad songs/ Videos which make them laugh and share with their friends. 

Secondly, we’re a film-obsessed country. We have Bollywood, Tollywood, Mollywood, Pollywood, all sorts of woods.

We are number one when it comes to ticket sales. And we all know how there are 10000 and 10000’s of struggling actors wanting to make it big here. But let’s face it, the barriers to entry are very high in this industry.

So now with Smartphones, cheap internet (love you Mukesh Ambani), and TikTok, the world is their oyster, and they can now finally showcase all their talents (more often than not, hobbies), and go viral literally anytime, and get that taste of fame that they’ve always craved for.

So is it a good thing that people are using Tiktok so much?

The people who make it there earn a whopping $200-$2000 dollars or more, based on your followers, much like Instagram. I mean, they're at least injecting money into the Economy.

But some kids there are just wasting time on It, and getting distracted. Some are even dying while performing challenges. But this comes with any social media app, to be honest.

Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t get why people use TikTok and yes I still do find it cringy

But am I going to still watch it? You know I will.