THE JOURNAL
Illustrations by Mr Pete Gamlen
As we enter the middle years of this terminally online decade, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is only one place to be. And with apologies to Mr Mark Zuckerberg, it is not the metaverse. Everyone – and we mean everyone – is on TikTok right now. Your mum, your dad, Madonna, that bloke from Kent who eats two blocks of cheddar every day… even MR PORTER.
The video-sharing app’s rocket-powered ascent from a buzzy but gimmicky platform for lip-syncing Gen Zers to the world’s most-visited website – a title it stole from Google last year – has taken the social-media world by storm, leaving its competitors in a frantic scrabble to keep up. If you’ve noticed Instagram doing more video over the last few months, or YouTube pushing you gently but firmly towards shorter-form content, then you have the success of TikTok to thank.
But to what does it owe this success? Many point to its algorithm, which seems to have a knack for serving up exactly the kind of content that keeps us scrolling. One of the most common observations of TikTok is that it seems to know us better than we know ourselves; as it turns out, this is more than just a hunch.
“TikTok uses a ‘recommendation engine’ to serve personalised content,” explains creative agency (and official TikTok partner) OK COOL. “It takes in various signals from user in-app activity including previous interactions with content, video information – including device sound and captions – and your device language and location.”
In other words, subtle behavioural traits that even you might not notice – how long you linger on a video; if you turn the sound up on your phone; if you click onto the user profile to see more – will inform the kind of content that you see in the future.
This personalised content is delivered to each individual user via their FYP, or For You Page, an endless stream of videos as unique as a fingerprint that becomes more and more tailored to them with every minute that they spend on the app.
There is a side-effect to this, of course, which is that your FYP isn’t just your window into the world of TikTok. It’s a window into your soul, too, revealing more about your habits and urges, your passions and desires than you might be comfortable with – or even aware of.
All of which brings us, in a roundabout fashion, to the central question: what does your FYP say about you?
01.
Get-Rich-Quick-Tok
Spend enough time on TikTok and you’ll reach the inevitable conclusion that salaried employment is a mug’s game and what you should actually be doing is leveraging yourself to the hilt in order to invest in rental properties. At least, that seems to be the message coming from TikTok’s financial influencers – or “fin-fluencers”, if you absolutely must – who drive home their point by delivering it from the driver’s seat of a supercar or a sunlounger on a tropical beach. It should be mentioned that they’re not all con artists; there’s some sound advice out there, it’s just a shame that you have to sift through so much nonsense to find it. If you find your FYP full of this kind of content, it might be a sign that you should check your credit score.
02.
Cringe-Tok
Grab some popcorn and head straight to the comments because TikTok is absolutely awash with cringey content: poorly advised thirst traps; amateurish cooking videos; earnestly delivered cod philosophy; pointless lifehacks; or anything, really, that displays a chronic lack of self-awareness. That the creators responsible for this content not only failed to see how bad it was, but actually thought it was good enough to put on the internet, is inherently funny, and explains the success of popular reposting accounts such as @favetiktoks420 on Instagram. Should you feel bad about laughing? Of course not. It’s natural to find pleasure in watching someone else’s downfall, especially when it’s preceded by overconfidence. Germans even have a word for this: schadenfreude. But if your FYP is dominated by this kind of content alone, then you might be a terrible person. We’re just saying.
03.
Thirst-Tok
Social-media platforms and content that borders on the pornographic go hand-in-hand. You’ll be happy to hear that TikTok is no exception, with accounts catering for all tastes and orientations, and ranging from the straightforwardly raunchy through to the subtle and sophisticated and all the way to the downright weird. It’s this latter category that separates TikTok from its competitors: where else are you going to find a hunky guy splitting logs in the forest in an oddly erotic way? Or a man eating tacos, oysters and mussels while making unflinching eye contact and using way too much tongue? Yes, kink is alive and well on TikTok, and if there’s an undiscovered sexual proclivity lying dormant in your brain, it may be while scrolling through your FYP that you finally realise it. (As for what an overload of thirsty content in your feed says about you, that’s probably just the algorithm recognising that you’re in a long-term relationship.)
04.
Clean-Tok
Cleaning videos are one of modern life’s greatest pleasures. Who hasn’t whiled away a Sunday morning on YouTube watching a man called Steve power-wash overgrown driveways and long-abandoned swimming pools? Craving order in a world that tends inevitably towards chaos is part of what makes us human, but throw TikTok’s algorithmic feedback loop into the equation and curiosity can quickly turn into grotesque fascination. One moment you’re enjoying Ms Marie Kondo-style videos of people organising their kitchen drawers, the next, you’re watching a blacksmith grind sharpen and polish a rusty old knife; and before you know it you’re deep in the murky world of blackhead extraction videos. Beware: it’s a slippery slope.
05.
Fit-Tok
No, not fit as in fitness, that’s a whole different world. Fit as in “outfit”. TikTok’s growing influence on the world of fashion was made clear in 2020 when Mr Hedi Slimane premiered “The Dancing Kid”, a collection for CELINE HOMME inspired by the #Eboy, a TikTok-native trend that wrapped emo and grunge references up in an anime aesthetic. It was a clear illustration of the power of the app to amplify ultra-niche trends, but it’s far from the only example. Other style movements to have flourished on TikTok in recent years include cottagecore, a fashion equivalent of the pastoral ideal; blokecore, an ironic appropriation of 1990s lad culture; and auntiecore (see Mr Chris Pine in his “wine aunt phase”). There are thousands more, too, each speaking to an incredibly specific aesthetic interest. Whatever your personal style, some element of it is bound to be reflected in your FYP.