Shutterstock
If you’re not exactly tapped-in on the newest apps and trends, you might be a bit out of the loop when it comes to TikTok. Kids and teenagers all over the world love the app, which features short video clips and lip-synching challenges. But what, exactly, is it? Let’s take a closer look at one of the hottest new apps on smartphones all over the world.
TikTok is an app made by Chinese company ByteDance. Ostensibly, it’s an app in which users can watch and upload short video clips. In that regard, it is not dissimilar to Vine, a now-defunct app that spawned countless funny short videos.
TikTok is a bit more focused on dancing, lip-synching, and music-related content, though. This is partly because much of the app’s DNA comes from its immediate predecessor, Musical.ly.
Musical.ly was merged with the original Chinese app, Douyin, and brought to American audiences. It’s been a smash hit among children, especially, and it has led to the rise of many dance challenges and obscure videos.
TikTok does something, out of the gate, that other social media apps were hesitant to do. As soon as you sign up for TikTok, it begins showing you recommended content. You can follow your friends, of course, and you can send other users messages. However, the core of the app is inherently dissimilar from the friends-centric Facebook or follower-obsessed Twitter.
Instead, TikTok makes friend groups for you, centrally. Trending hashtags, new dance challenges and goofy inside jokes are immediate. Hashtags play an even more central role for TikTok than they ever did on Twitter, with entire nebulous in-groups forming around them overnight.
By presenting a monolithic pillar of engagement at the center of the app, TikTok brute forces something other apps have been dying to get right. In essence, TikTok supplants friends lists with centralized engagement. This isn’t a surprising design, given the ways that Facebook and Instagram try to use algorithms to guess which content will be most engaging.
However, it’s the panache with which TikTok executes its machine-driven quest for engagement that is impressive. With a few simple nudges, it gets users to not only consume content, but make it. The ample challenges, filters, hashtags, and other prompts allow for the quick and easy creation of ready-made content.
TikTok is a glimpse into the potential future of social engagement apps, for better or worse. It’s all flash, all machine, all content, all consumption. Time will tell whether it’s beautiful or horrible.
