Weekly update: TikTok is weird

I’ve given myself 12 Challenges to make the internet a bit better. Here, I give a quick update on how it’s all going.

---

This week I returned to my desk properly after just over a month away. So I promptly wasted most of it on TikTok.

I wish I was joking, but at least it was for a good cause — the TrojanTok challenge, which Max Kafanke is helping me out with. Max recently completed his Masters in Innovation Management, Entrepreneurship and Sustainability — we crossed paths when he interviewed me for his (very cool) dissertation on unethical product design.

Here are some highlights from the TrojanTok side:

TikTok is weird

Jumping into TikTok for the first time is strange. It’s as if there’s a whole other way of life and language there. Two things have stood out in particular:

• As a newbie, it’s hard to understand why a lot of the content is good (although we’re not doubting that it is). Videos often seem to be referencing other trends/videos, making it feel like you can’t get it unless you’ve spent a lot of time in the app. Which, obviously, most users have

• It’s so in-your-face! Autoplay is everywhere (by which I mean, as you browse around, videos just start playing without your consent) — it’s interesting that TikTok know they’ll get away with this, and shows just how much this manipulative design is normalized in 2024

A depressing conclusion from this is that it would be very difficult to become good at TikTok without becoming addicted to TikTok.

This is worth emphasising. It means that you likely have to sacrifice around 10% of your waking life if you want to gain an edge in building an audience on the platform.

Not gonna lie, that freaks us both out a little — so I’ve reached out to a few people to see if I can outsource some part of the TrojanTok post creation.

As someone avowedly against social media, I’m not that keen on falling into the ironic trap of becoming addicted to TikTok while helping people become less addicted to TikTok. (Or maybe that’s the ultimate sacrifice?)

I also now know an unhealthy amount about scheduling posts on TikTok:

• You can’t do it from the mobile app, at all

• You can do it from the desktop site, but this lacks tools for adding TikTok captions to the videos (which some people think improves the chances of TikTok promoting your video)

• So the (clumsy) workflow would have to be something like:

  • Make video on TikTok mobile app

  • Publish it to only yourself (i.e. Private), to save to Camera Roll — that’s the only way to get the file of your video

  • Transfer to desktop, and then schedule

And even after all that, TikTok may look askance at your video for seeming like it wasn’t made end-to-end in their app. You could alternatively use some third-party tools, like Hootsuite (but again not clear if TikTok will penalize you for doing so).

To slash the cost of producing content, I became interested in creating an account that simply posts the same video again and again, but found out that doing this will almost certainly result in shadowbanning, in other words your video won’t be shown in people’s For You pages.

On the subject of shadowbanning, I started freaking out that it had happened to me, since my incredibly lazy first attempt at a TrojanTok account got 0 views on its (admittedly atrocious) second video.

My best guess at why is that it includes negative language. It really is incredible to consider that this social media behemoth may stop content from being recommended if it isn’t upbeat. But then again, this is the same company that pretends no one uses it for news or politics.

Incidentally, I had fun making a TikTok-style logo for the first TrojanTok account:

I was curious about who designed the original TikTok logo — which uses a trick called chromatic aberration to make the eye think it’s moving a little — so I did a little bit of research, finding this from TikTok’s site:

So all this HAL 9000-esque statement tells us about the person who designed one of the world’s most famous logos is that they are a young man who loves attending concerts, especially rock concerts. Rock on, dude!

In other news

From this point on, I’m going to treat the Challenges in a less linear way, modelled on the Tiny Projects approach. Here are a few things I’m looking at doing in the next week:

• Giving free consulting to people who want to adopt linknames, after experiencing overwhelming demand on this front (OK, just my friend Arjun so far)

• A moonshot attempt at getting Donald Glover to adopt a linkname, something I’ve been considering for a while but have been too much of a chicken to follow through with

• Continue collaborating with Peter Hagen on a very neat idea which could make the web a little less dependent on platforms (we hope to launch soon)

• Mulling over whether I should scrape together funds to get Brian Cox from Succession to make a Cameo for a TikTok account called logoutroy, where he’d yell at people to get off their phones. I probably won’t do this, but it’s a fun idea. If you’re Kendall Roy and you’d like to fund this, let me know

• Start posting 3 times a week on LinkedIn, Twitter and Mastodon about 12 Challenges (and tech activism in general), since I’m realizing that I need to post consistently in lots of places to drive traffic to this Substack

Thanks for reading — I’ll be back soon, and please leave any thoughts in the comments!