You've managed to find the word I've been looking for to describe why I don't like TikTok. It feels taxing. It makes my head spin and after a couple minutes I feel exhausted. Maybe my brain's just too slow and sensitive.
> The worst thing is that these apps addict one to unrealistic expectations and instant gratifications.
I mean, there's also racism, sexism, white nationalism, etc. that TikTok occasionally dumps into your feed to test your engagement with it in order to improve the psychographic profile it uses to decide what to throw at you next. (To be clear, this is not hypothetical, this is my personal experience with it.)
> You can typically tell within the first 5 seconds whether the video is for you
You most definitely can't. The vast majority of TikTok's are extremely clickbait-y and entice you to watch till the end without you knowing if there will be a payoff.
When I first started using TikTok I felt like I was constantly getting scammed of my time.
I think TikTok is the worst social media platform. It's extremely easy to waste a large amount of time on it and come away with nothing.
> Is there some social signal they aren’t getting from my setup
Honestly from the description you wrote it just does not seem like TikTok is the right platform for you.
What I like about it is the light-heartedness of it, I don't see political content at all and I wouldn't really be interested if I got any as it's a pretty terrible platform for news and hot takes. Instead, I get cooking/funny/cute/surreal meme videos that match the Gen Z humor. It distracts me from gloomy Twitter/Facebook feeds.
It's not an app for serious content, it's a dopamine treadmill.
> Someone at Tiktok decided that I had to receive this kind of content, no matter what, because of my age and location and sex probably. They were pushing an agenda.
Why would you do that lol? Do you really have FOMO for the next garbage social media dopamine machine that simply wants to hijack your attention to sell ads and get you addicted to zombie scrolling like every other instance before it? Why does it have to work for you? I think you have your answer at this point.
It's just another garbage lowest common denominator mass content farm and memes. It doesn't have to be nor isn't something more profound than that, and in fact with it's short content length and more sophisticated AI it's just like everything before but worse.
You can certainly just dismiss it and occupy your limited time doing something else more productive or fulfilling.
> Tiktok is full of girls dancing with very little or very tight clothes on for likes and attention.
Even if that was true, so what? While the venue changes, that’s what bitter elders always complain about about youth culture, to the point where it being a recognized cliche is ancient.
> On top of that it is designed to be addicting for the sake of addiction.
All of social media (and most of the web, and much offline entertainment) is optimized around engagement, to the same extent. There’s nothing special about TikTok here.
>I like to think of TikTok as the crack cocaine of addictive social media.
>If you are susceptible to media addiction I suggest never downloading it.
These are the two big takeaways I've had from using the app for a day. Everything about it is designed to be a sinkhole, like a modern casino where they're gambling with your attention. I know a lot of people who use Facebook/Instagram/TikTok compulsively, and it ruins them to a degree. I think (or hope, at least) the future is headed towards more personal communique (a-la Discord, Slack, Matrix, etc.)
This issue isn't a bee stuck in my presonal bonnet, but this is a fraudulent response that convinces nobody that didn't already agree with you. I'll explain why.
The people complaining about TikTok were probably complaining about the others for ages too.
Those complainers were shouted down with some version of "well, they're not THAT bad."
Now there is one actor that is seen (at least by some) as worse than the others. The difference in the actor is being raised as a reason to care about their actions (and maybe renew concern about the category of actions at large).
Your response that their actions are not novel is either ignorant or perpetuating a fraud.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and (to a lesser extent) YouTube are weapons of psychological warfare that have been optimised to spread political misinformation and outrage.
TikTok, on the other hand, is just hot chicks dancing, stupid memes and Shrugging Black Italian Man. It reminds me a lot of old YouTube in that regard.
Well, you are. That's true for all of the "attention economy".
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