An appreciation of TikTok

I wanted write a bit about TikTok, one of the unexpectedly good things about this pandemic for us.

We mostly just started using it to get content similar to the defunct Vine app, but through TikTok’s algorithm we found so much more interesting content than we expected. There’s creators specialising in plant care, mental health, depression, ADHD, psychology, Dungeons & Dragons, vegan cooking, arts, creativity, mycology, and a lot more. And the algorithm is really good at figuring out what type of content you might want to see.

A lot of these creators have influenced us in positive ways, we’re taking (even) better care of our plants, we’re feeling more inspired to cook, we’re more aware of mental health issues and how to work with them, etc.

That’s pretty great for an app. And seeing some creators skyrocket from a few followers to 12 million over the course of months is exciting and terrifying.

I’ve added a list of our favourite creators below, but first… let’s talk about Vine.

We used to be huge fans of Vine when it was still around. Mostly for the comedy. It basically launched a whole new genre of comedy, 6-second comedy sketches. It promoted some really talented creators, most of which did not actually manage to succesfully translate their content to YouTube’s longer format (except for maybe Calebcity).

Ever since Vine’s demise there had been a bit of a hole in our lives. We’d watch Vine compilations on Youtube, but at some point that’s just rehashing the same things. We tried Byte (the spiritual successor to Vine) but in the end neither the quality nor quantity of the content was really what we had hoped.

So after running out of Vine compilations, we inevitably stumbled upon TikTok compilations, and finally, after seeing certain creators appear regularly, we made the jump.

We made a list of creators we wanted to follow, and TikTok’s algorithm took care of the rest. Before you knew it, we followed all sorts of creators with all kinds of different content. It’s also great that it puts older posts by creators you follow in your “followed” timeline, so you don’t have to manually scroll down someone’s profile to see stuff you haven’t seen yet.

Some of our favourites

This might take a bit to load, sadly…