Over the weekend I saw a screenshot from a viral video going around on Reddit. So I did something I hadn’t done in a few weeks: opened my TikTok app to watch it.
Not to be that guy, but I came to TikTok early. A colleague in my previous role at BuzzFeed News turned me onto the app when it had just merged with Musical.ly in the latter part of 2018. “It’s an actually fun place on the internet,” I remember her telling me. “No one’s trying to sell you anything. No children are being exploited. It’s just a bunch of high school and college kids making jokes.”
For a few years, it was. Then COVID-19 hit, and the platform genuinely exploded. Everyone and their (literal) mother was downloading the app, doing the “Savage” dance, and making skits about being “bored in the house, in the house bored.” Teenagers like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae started going mega-viral on the app and soon became household names. It was a good time, and I now think those years represented the golden age of TikTok.
It’s all been downhill from here.
Sure, TikTok is currently a place to make a lot of money. It is also somewhere people, especially young people, spend a lot of time. It’s the center of culture in many respects, and the stats don’t lie. TikTok itself claims that over 1 billion people “regularly” come to its app, and 67% of American teens reported they use it in a 2023 study by Pew Research. Stories abound about all the industries TikTok is supplanting for the younger generations, from completely upending the music industry to disrupting film, television, and (sob) news. From a business perspective, Digiday reported last month that ad spending is expected to increase by as much as 25% in 2024, though it notes the ad spend on TikTok is still a “drop in the bucket” compared to how much is spent on platforms like Meta.
So, if that’s the case, why do I find it so utterly lifeless, and so devoid of anything entertaining lately? If TikTok is the center of attention for so much of the cultural conversation, why do I open it, get bored, cringe, and leave? Why does scrolling through it feel more like homework?
Maybe I’m just becoming out of touch. (I am a millennial and no longer at the forefront of culture, after all.) But I don’t think that’s it. The app has lost something central in the past year: a sense of fun, entertainment, and spontaneity that I am not sure it can get back.
When TikTok first started, the people creating videos on the platform were doing it purely for fun and entertainment. They weren’t trying to impact culture and go viral, so of course they did. As more and more people got involved with the platform, more and more of this content was created. One of the reasons TikTok was able to grow so quickly was that it combined many elements of already successful social media networks. It had the video element and visuals of YouTube; the lifestyle, beauty, and fashion content of Instagram; and the spontaneity and weirdness of Vine. It was a place where you could truly find anything you wanted, ending up on this or that TikTok subculture due to its scarily prescient algorithm. It was everything for everyone, swallowing up every other aspect of pop culture as it went.
Can I make a confession, though? I always found TikTok a little cringe. More than once in the past few years, I’ve thanked my lucky stars that I was reared in the good old days of social media, when I could just dump 50 photos I took on my digital camera into a Facebook album with a “witty” title and call it a day. I didn’t have to act, lip-synch, or God forbid, dance, in order to curate a social media brand and gain social capital among my peers. I always felt a little sorry for the Gen Z’ers out in these streets, forced to essentially be multihyphenate performers in order to participate in the social media their generation engaged with the most. What if you can’t dance? What if you just aren’t that funny?
Well, a few years after TikTok’s boom, we now know the answers to these questions. Now that being a creator is a mainstream job and TikTok is the easiest way to establish yourself and grow a following, there are a lot more people on there trying to “make it.” My feed is now a confusing mess of people of all demographics trying to go viral, in increasingly cringeworthy and occasionally eyebrow-raising ways. It gives me the embarrassment shivers to watch people poorly act out scenes from this or that meme in order to try to jump on the latest trend, which seems to get less or less funny by the day.
What’s even more disturbing is how all the worst parts of other social media platforms have been able to infect TikTok at warp speed, proliferating at an alarming rate. We have the clout-chasing and prank culture of YouTube, where people are willing to humiliate themselves or fake videos for views. Then there’s the fake news and misinformation of Facebook and Twitter, with young women increasingly being fed lies about birth control and “independent journalists” who spread false information about major news stories like the Idaho college student murders and even the war in Gaza. And there’s the children-on-the-internet question that has haunted every social media platform since their inception.
As the platform grows, more and more people are willing to ramp up all these things in order to get noticed, and we all know that won’t end well. There’s also the rise of TikTok Shop, a new feature that has left many of its users and creators disgruntled. Earlier this month Meredith Lynch, a popular TikToker with more than 250,000 followers on the app, said she feels that the platform is prioritizing this new shopping experience so much that it will eventually crowd out all other types of content, comparing the structure of the new business to a MLM.
TikTok content
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To me, all of these are signs that the app may have already peaked. But there are other ones too. Like, when was the last time someone truly got famous off TikTok? (I actually know the answer: It was Alix Earle.) Let’s go to a personal level: When was the last time you found a new creator you really liked on TikTok? What about a truly original video?
Maybe you have, and fair enough. But to me, the biggest sign that the writing’s on the wall is that I’m not excited to go on TikTok anymore. When I open it, I am accosted by so many people who seem so desperate to be famous, it’s almost uncomfortable. I don’t laugh as much, and I don’t find as much beauty and lifestyle inspiration. I am constantly being sold stuff. I’m just as likely to get mad about some pop culture “insider” spouting bogus blind items as I am to actually learn something. And now that TikTok-style videos are easily accessible on Instagram Reels, Reddit, and (it pains me to admit this) X/Twitter, I find myself watching content on these platforms instead more often than not.
Now I’m not predicting TikTok’s imminent demise. I’m sure the next #girldinner or dance trend is right around the corner to take over our cultural awareness and our news feeds. I just think the peak is in our rearview mirror. If the last few decades of social media have taught me anything, this means our next, new platform is already around the corner (time flies!). What will be the next TikTok after TikTok is anyone’s guess.
It’s easy to wax poetic about the way TikTok used to be, before it was taken over by brands, sponcon, and all that other noise. But such is the nature of the social web. Nothing good can stay.
Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers.
