TikTok Rises From The Grave, Interrupting A Meme-Filled Funeral

1 year ago 48

A TikTok logo is displayed on an iPhone.

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Somehow, TikTok returned.

The video-sharing app is in the process of being restored after ByteDance shut down the app on Saturday, January 18, following the U.S. ban.

TikTok began flickering back to life on Sunday morning, with the “death” of the app lasting less than a day.

Several high-profile entrepreneurs have made headlines with their intentions to buy the app, from YouTube sensation MrBeast to serious gamer Elon Musk, but ByteDance has expressed no interest in selling.

While the long-term future of TikTok is still unknown, ByteDance has announced a willingness to “work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”

TikTokers celebrated the resurrection hours after TikTok’s shutdown inspired a meme-filled funeral, in which TikTok creators and users shared their favorite videos, reflecting on the positives and negatives of the short-form video app.

TikTokers Reflected On The Legacy Of TikTok

Despite being caught in the middle of a geopolitical tug-of-war, TikTok is beloved by many internet users, ever since the pandemic pushed millions of bored Americans to discover a new digital frontier.

In the brief hours in which TikTok was inaccessible, commentators were collecting, sharing and discussing their favorite videos from the app, highlighting TikTok’s influence on U.S. internet culture.

X (Twitter) went wild with TikTok-related prompts, as users took the opportunity to squeeze some extra engagement from the doomed app.

Many lamented the potential loss of income, citing TikTok creators who managed to make a living making content.

TikTok has exposed users to weird videos, charismatic creators, political awakenings, layered jokes, and unique trends.

It’s often noted that TikTok played a major role in the online shift from text to video, changing the shape of memes, as the snappy, often-anonymous witticisms of Twitter were steadily replaced by intimate close-ups of TikTokers monologuing in their bedrooms.

Perhaps TikTok made us all more shallow, as pretty faces and soothing voices became an important ingredient to virality, but TikTok also showed us how many incredibly intelligent, creative and charismatic creators are out there, far removed from the opportunities of the entertainment industry, but able to craft compelling content with nothing but a smartphone.

Many claimed that TikTok had educated them and expanded their horizons, but others pointed out that the app was also a gushing sewer pipe of misinformation, and hyper-stimulating “brainrot.”

Superstition, New Age beliefs and paranormal sightings run rampant on the app (many TikTok users seem convinced of the existence of giants, despite the impracticality of keeping such large entities a secret).

Many TikTokers fled to the Chinese-owned app, Xiaohongshu (RedNote in English) in anticipation of the U.S. TikTok ban, deliberately choosing a Chinese app over Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

Now, American TikTokers are chatting, joking and flirting with Chinese RedNote users, sparking new connections, despite the language barrier.

It’s unclear if RedNote’s popularity will last, seeing as TikTok is returning, and there seems to be no other app that scratches the same itch.

Why Is TikTok So Popular?

Meta and YouTube have certainly tried to copy TikTok’s timeline, but TikTok’s secret sauce isn’t short-form video, but the app’s sticky algorithm.

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is sometimes useful, more often a mixed bag, but many view Meta’s algorithm as almost useless, as Instagram and Facebook is infested with AI-generated slop.

Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day attributes TikTok’s insightful algorithm to a focus on selling products to the user, as opposed to Western social media apps, which are “much more interested in selling you to advertisers.”

Many critical words have been written about TikTok’s uncanny ability to anticipate what the viewer wants to see, and the app’s tendency to silo users into narrow echo chambers, but nevertheless, TikTokers seem to love using it.

Online, the prevailing attitude seems to be that if social media users are going to have their data mined, they may as well have fun doing so—it doesn’t matter who is doing the extracting.

TikTok’s funeral may have been interrupted, but the app’s future is far from certain.

If TikTok does disappear (again), there will be a gaping chasm left in the digital landscape, and it’s unclear if there’s an American competitor ready to plug the gap.