breakreminder.org: a TikTok account to help you use TikTok less

For Challenge 2: TrojanTok, I came up with a simple plan:

Help thousands of people spend less time on TikTok with a Trojan Horse account that posts nothing except daily reminders to take a break from TikTok.

How it’s going:

• Started the account on 7th Feb, 1.5 months ago

• Quickly realized I suck at TikTok, so found Cole via Reddit and hired her to manage the account

• Cole has been brilliant, going above and beyond the call of duty and taking to heart the advice of my brother Lazlo (aka Pink Mario) to experiment tirelessly with content to see what sticks

• Now at nearly 400 followers, 1000s of likes, and several videos with 1000s of views

• After a few shadowban scares, we now seem consistently able to get onto For You Page (FYP), which is the part of TikTok users spend nearly all their time in

• 📢: This week I’m excited to announce that we’re rebranding the account as breakreminder.org (formerly dailybreakreminder), with a brand new minimalist website to put our mission front-and-centre. Please share the TikTok account or the site with anyone you think would be interested!

What I’ve learned:

• To be good at TikTok, you have to understand it. To understand it, you have to use it. If you use it, you might become addicted. That’s something significant to factor into the potential cost of being good at it

• You’ll never understand the algorithm, but you’ll still try to. I’ve lost count of the number of posts on r/tiktok and r/tiktokhelp I’ve now read where baffled influencers try to understand why their numbers plummeted over night and people lay out their pet theories of how to game the system

  • It brings to mind Beth Singler’s paper on being ‘Blessed by the algorithm’, which 12 Challenges reader Becca Ricks sent me (thank you!)

• One thing I would say though is: if you’ve been shadowbanned, with 0 views on your views, all is not yet lost — we were there, and we somehow climbed out. (Because we were blessed by the algorithm, obviously)

• Scheduling a year’s worth of posts in advance was probably never a good strategy (and would have been hard to do on a practical level). It would’ve limited our ability to create content based on what’s trending, which has been our most successful strategy so far

What’s next:

• 400 followers won’t move any needles anytime soon. But I do feel that breakreminder.org has potential. I could be the gambler who won’t leave the roulette table, but my sense is that we’re not too far from a hit which could make the 2024 goal of 10,000 followers achievable

• So for a little while longer at least, we’re going to keep our heads down in TikTok to get people’s heads up from TikTok

• Suggestions, ideas, thoughts, feedback, strategies — all welcome!