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.
My wife is hooked on Tiktok and sometimes shows me a long series of what the algorithm recommended to her. Fortunately it's mostly dog and horse videos, but I can feel that aggressive obnoxious format giving me anxiety, especially when it's "reaction face reacting to a reaction face with a wall of text and a 5 second clip of a pop song that expects full understanding of the context."
My wife shows me this stuff, too, and I'm just like
Why the fuck did you put your face over someone else's video!? You're not adding anything!
It feels a bit like artificial social pressure: "THIS is how you should FEEL about this! I am modeling YOUR expected reaction!"
You're right. They a doing preemptive behavior mirroring like we're children