And so introduces one of my biggest pet-peeves about the modern day Internet: logging on to seemingly any major website without having endless bullshit from TikTok shoved down your throat is a practical impossibility in 2023.
There are literally dozens of reasons, if not even more, to hate this godawful social media platform, so I'll cover some of them one by one:
To be fair, this one isn't entirely TikTok's fault, as vertical video was popularized by other shitty platforms such as Instragram and Snapchat beforehand. However, it WAS TikTok that essentially brought vertical video into the accepted mainstream - and there's no going back now.
Here's a brief overview of the vertical video problem itself:
Now, this is not a new problem, unfortunately. It began with the advent of the smartphone in the late 2000's, although it didn't start to become a more major issue until the mid 2010's or so.
Are smartphones more comfortable to hold vertically rather than horizontally? Absolutely. I'm not here to debate what is basically a fact. But apparently, some people got so lazy that they decided to disregard the fact that landscape has been the accepted format of videography since the first moving picture was filmed in 1888, and started to record their videos like this for the entire world to see:
YouTube/Glove and Boots
Face it! Vertical video looks like crap on anything other than a phone screen. If you've ever seen television news stations play vertical videos during a report, for example, you'll know what I'm talking about.
So instead of reminding people to hold their damn phones sideways while recording video, social media and datamining companies saw an opportunity to serve people even more targeted ads - but serve them those ads in a format where they don't have to turn their phone sideways to watch them! And as more and more people were exposed to vertical video content constantly, more and more of those people started to film their own videos in this abysmal format.
Through about 2019, most people were still able to at least acknowledge that vertical video was inferior to landscape video. But then the COVID lockdowns hit and TikTok blew up. People stopped questioning vertical video and just sort of accepted it as they got bored out of their mind and had nothing else to do but scroll through social media while cooped up in their homes and apartments. And now that it's essentially become an accepted part of media in general - these days, people who dare question the nature of vertically filmed videos get assblasted into a 'thumbs down' oblivion more often than not.
The many faces of dismal content on the platform known as TikTok is a mega rabbit hole, so I'll use a bunch of bullet points here:
This list could honestly go on forever, but I think the point is illustrated.
TikTok is not only a platform full of talentless people, it's also having a negative impact on many of its viewers:
Okay, this probably isn't a shocker to anyone. Actually, some idiots are perfectly content with all of their personal information being datamined and accessible to the Communist Party of China.
But even taking the CCP out of the equation, TikTok is still a particularly volatile form of spyware. I'd go as far as to say that their datamining practices rival those of Google and Meta (Facebook), some of the most Orwellian privacy violators in the world, possibly even worse.
TikTok is known to collect your name, age, phone number, email, unique device ID, physical location, all of the content you view on their platform, online search history, your contacts and private messages, and probably even more - to build an extremely detailed profile of you that is invaluable to advertisers.
One of the worst parts is that TikTok allows third parties to collect your personal information separately from their discretion, so who knows what kind of malpractice is occurring beyond what TikTok themselves is doing?
The literal definition of 'cancer' is as follows: a disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body.
Using this analogy, the body is the Internet, and the disease is TikTok. Ever since TikTok blew up in the first half of 2020, other websites like YouTube, Facebook Watch, Twitter, Reddit and even 4chan have since become little more than repositories for TikTok reuploads and reposts. This useless, brain-eroding content blows up on these other websites, ultimately garnering up thousands of hours of watchtime from mindless zombies addicted to polished short-form vertical video, and thus buries or entirely replaces more useful, informative content in the process.
So no, it's not hyperbole. TikTok is a literal cancer spreading across the Internet.
The sad truth is: not much. At least in the long run, but we can at least make our internet experience less TikTok riddled for now.
Here are a few neat tips and tricks you may find helpful (I know I certainly do):TL;DR? Cry me a river. Sorry I couldn't cater to your miniscule attention span.
Special thanks to Maddox for giving me the inspiration to write this article. The common enemy known as BuzzFeed may have since been defeated and faded into obscurity, but we are now fighting a battle bigger than any of us could have ever imagined...