I installed it out of curiosity, and God damn, this is the worst form of social media yet. It seems like it's designed to accomplish two things: keep me scrolling, and eventually make me depressed. It's basically paralyzing to use.
I didn't make an account, so I guess its a bit like looking at the front page of YouTube, which is also terrible. But out of all the social media I've used in my life tiktok seems like the worst because of how much it sucks you in, and the type of content on it. Runner up is Instagram, but I deleted my account there years ago and never looked back.
Call me a boomer or w/e, but this shit melts your brain even more than everything else already does.
I've heard this before and it's crazy to me because TikTok has the worst search functionality of any service I've ever used. Reddit's was better. Also the content just isn't designed to answer queries? How can you use TikTok to look up literally anything? I don't think there's anything I would ever type into a search engine that could be better served to me by TikTok, unless it's a video trend that is only on TikTok, like grimace shakes or whatever's popular now.
On an unrelated note I always found the comments section to be totally useless, at least on any post with more than 10k likes. The top level comments might be alright, but if for some reason you want to open up the replies to a comment they load newest first. Numerous times there'll be a comment either elaborating on the original post or explaining why it's wrong or something but because TikTok has like a 20 character limit they'll have to reply to their own comment to continue their thought. But if a comment has even only a couple dozen replies it means that the reply you want to see is pushed to the bottom, and it only loads like four replies at a time so it just takes forever to get to the comment you want to read.
Yes! Tiktok's comment system is absolute dogshit.
And yes, it sucks as a search engine. There is limited usefulness for things like "cityname restaurants" because it brings up videos made in that area, that can sometimes show off the vibes of the place better than what's on Google. But it's like yeah, I will see 5-10 restaurants out of 200 in that area. And Google is already adding in the same type of social posts anyway.
Personally I would use TikTok a whole FUCK of a lot more if they gave me any control over the length of the video I want to see. If I am say, cooking, and want to listen to something, I have to just have gotten lucky with one long ass tiktok video, but once that is over, I have to use YouTube. TikTok also pushed and pushed people to make horizontal videos and long videos, but unlike youtube that lets you jump in and out of Shorts, there's no such thing as TikTok Longs.