Why you can’t stop watching TikTok
Behind the screen of TikTok’s tactics in the war for our attention.
A Product Manager’s Lament
I had a fling with TikTok this past April. I’d wind down with the app in bed, volume on low, scrolling as 15-second videos stretched into dark hours. What started as a distraction to weather the COVID lockdown quickly soured when my swiping turned compulsive. I deleted TikTok. Then I downloaded it again, and entered a self-loathing cycle of binging, deleting, and downloading until too many late nights culminated in an emphatic and final deletion in May. But the experience stuck with me. After almost 8 years working on ads at Twitter — freshly my ex-employer after a different existential lockdown-induced crisis — I know how the sausage is made. I understand the mechanics of an ad auction, the balance of persuasive notifications, and the role of experimentation in shaping a product, yet it still surprised me that I was so unable to control my use. What was it that made TikTok so addictive?
When I told my husband I’d be investigating the app, he asked if I was digging into Bytedance and data mining. This wasn’t quite my focus. I assume that most of what I do on most apps is tracked, and recognize data’s central role in the preservation and profiting of today’s advertising-backed giants. TikTok is not unique in this regard. However, the dominance of data in TikTok’s narrative and the national security lens through which it is frequently presented leaves the app’s addictiveness and non-data contributors largely unexamined.
I would deconstruct the entire TikTok experience and lay bare the underlying components and choices that come together to make the app what it is. My unearthing would not be through employee interviews or forensic technical investigations, but as a user and ex-ads Product Manager, exposing what is visible but not readily seen. In other, lamer, words: a good old fashioned Product Teardown, the PM’s idea of fun. Unlike the Product Teardowns used to terrify interviewees or actually overhaul products, my primary goal would be to shine a light on addictive tech for the sole purpose of awareness, the collective and my own. That my study could also serve as a brain-teasing salve for my recent employment decision and exercise in its justification is also fortuitous. Five months TikTok-free, I gingerly downloaded the App again.
Onboarding (AKA You Live Here Now)
I had forgotten that there is almost no TikTok learning curve. In three screens, four taps and one swipe, I mastered the app without once opening my keyboard — a product triumph. First, I downloaded TikTok, choosing to sign in with my Apple ID. On the next screen, I was given the option to select from a list of interests to tell TikTok what I like. Last, I watched a 3 second tutorial on how to swipe up, signaled by a cartoon hand. I clicked to get started and was rewarded with my first video.
My onboarding was a breeze and reminded me of other apps I’ve signed up for. It was also highly calculated to lay the foundation for my compulsive TikTok use. I picture TikTok’s onboarding PM assessing the company’s lofty 3 year growth plans and drafting her product requirements. Her aim is to help potential customers progress from non-user to deriving value. Her principles for what the experience should be like are “fast”, “painless”, and “fun”. She sets goals for her team of engineers and designers around metrics like time spent on sign-up, number of clicks to the first video, % of sign-ups abandoned — all of which will be tracked. With these parameters, solutions take shape.
First, our PM decides customers must sign in or sign up after downloading the app. Users without accounts neither find nor offer much value on TikTok since their behaviors can’t be tracked. How can she make sign up easy? By allowing account creation with pre-existing Facebook, Apple, or Google accounts, a potential customer doesn’t weigh any time cost to signing up, nor give thought to the security implications in the time spent creating a new account and password, nor risk other apps competing for attention during a tedious process. This precedented account creation solution permits a streamlined onboarding experience. Indeed, as the user, I perceive I have given very little information and almost no time in exchange for endless videos — although over time I would come to pay heavily in both.
Next, our PM wants to help customers find “Value”, which on TikTok ostensibly means entertainment, connection, and self-expression. This deserves a much closer look but is unfortunately above the pay grade and outside the scope of our early-career PM. We’ll come back to it. For the purpose of all TikTok’s PMs, Value has been universally distilled to its more measurable side effect: Use. Our onboarding PM ponders how to affect industry-standard Use metrics like “Watch Time”, “Session Duration” and “Monthly Active Users”, positing: if customers could select from a list of interests during onboarding, might this lead to longer first sessions and more long term use? Her hypothesis is completely testable, and TikTok has no doubt experimented extensively with onboarding concepts like interest selection down to fonts and colors in pursuit of the best Use outcomes.
Last, users must understand how to use TikTok. For this, the app introduces the universal gesture of swiping to navigate videos in an interactive tutorial; that there is no instruction around unintuitive functions like private messaging or making videos re-enforces how TikTok wants us to realize Value. As the standard convention has already taught us how to swipe and what happens when we do, the tutorial may instead serve as a primer: I see a swiping hand, so I swipe, rewarded in Skinner-esque fashion with the next video instead of putting down my phone.
I Only Have Eyes (and Ears) For You
While not itself addicting, my sign-up sets the tone for my time on TikTok. I mostly hang out on my For You Page — or FYP, as its users endearingly refer to the heart of the app — indulging in endless videos made by TikTokkers. I don’t choose what I watch on my FYP, but am shown videos curated specifically for me. My viewing experience is frictionless: I open the app to a video playing automatically, sound on, full screen in portrait mode, which loops infinitely until I swipe up. Although I learned swiping in onboarding, a competitive differentiation dawns on me here: on TikTok, one swipe advances me one video at a time, and I land with that next video squarely in view. On peer’s feeds I scroll, modulating the strength of my swipe, thumb-stopping when something catches my attention, micro-scrolling content into place, then choosing to click or engage. By limiting navigational freedom, TikTok has prevented my scrolling-enabled glossing over, and I come to watch each video I am shown.
TikTok complements automated video play with attention directing designs. The app’s default edge-to-edge format allows little room for distraction, and TikTok boasts the largest rich-media size among its peers. Social actions and hashtags are simply displayed on top of videos, paling against a moving backdrop of bodies and faces, and the navigation tab anchored to the bottom of the screen is the sole visually distinct component. There is also no indicator of video length or progress on TikTok, so I am conveniently unencumbered by the time I spend in an experience optimized for my maximal consumption.
Compounding TikTok’s immersive UI is the app’s centering of audio in the form of “Sounds”. A vestige of Musical.ly, Sounds are more than audio tracks, but sharable standalone components that shape creation and consumption. Sounds dictate video premises, as creators dance, react or lip sync to the same 15 second trending song clips and comedy bits, and inspire music video-like content that is uniquely TikTok. The app necessitates a sound-on experience, and I oblige despite the rule that my phone volume is muted on every other app I use. Not surprisingly, the audio-visual combination is more captivating, and TikTok’s standout feature expands its range and draw. That certain Sounds are used and re-used in viral waves means I often find myself humming that one TikTok song as I go about my day, the app asserting its hold through earworms.
One of TikTok’s most potent features is its FYP video recommendation algorithms. The app collects data about watch patterns — presumably what you watch, for how long, when you watch — and pairs this with video attribute data to show you the exact right videos at the right time. The more you watch, the more data TikTok collects, the better these predictions get. This alone is unremarkable, as many apps follow this formula to boost consumer use and ad revenue. What is striking is how quickly TikTok learns your preferences.
Getting recommendations right for a new user can be a challenging ‘cold start’ problem: lack of prior data makes it difficult to draw inferences about preference. TikTok doesn’t gain much ground from explicit user data — what users indicate about their preferences — since the app requires only optional interest selection during sign-up, a far cry from Facebook’s panoply of demographics. Similarly, while TikTok tracks in-app user behaviors and collects off-app data, the data they collect seems to be no more egregious than peers, as Elliot Alderson uncovered in TikTok: Logs Logs Logs and TikTok: What is an app log?. Instead, TikTok may benefit from the differentiated form and nature of its videos.
That TikTok users unambiguously view a single video at a time may help explain the app’s accelerated learning curve: since TikTok knows exactly what I’m looking at and when, it can interpret my time spent on a screen as a clear signal of preference. The data is clean. In contrast, on peers Pinterest and Twitter, I can simultaneously view 6 or more different pieces of content, likely muddying my preference signal, at least until the app learns where on my screen I like to focus. Further, only one piece of content has to load with each page refresh on TikTok. Computational load withstanding, TikTok’s capability to react immediately to user preference feedback ostensibly enables real-time recommendations that are more finely tuned than feed-based peers, where one-page refresh retrieves a dozen or so Tweets or Posts. It also can’t hurt that, unlike Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest, TikTok is Video only: company alignment around arguably the most engaging format sets the app up for strategic success, while fewer competing objectives, a simplified product suite, and a clear focus enable high functioning teams.
TikTok’s videos are also differentiated by their uniformity. After only a short time on the app, I observed a popular genre of copy-cat video, in which creators emulate premise and Sound in the latest viral trends and challenges. This phenomenon begets a wealth of similar videos that can be easily classified by TikTok with high confidence by their shared Hashtags and Sounds. When applied to FYP recommendations, this benefits TikTok mightily — and indeed, the app promotes this use case as we’ll explore — permitting both excellent training data for algorithm improvement and many options to draw from for your next FYP video.
Under My Thumb, Still Under Your Spell
TikTok’s optimization doesn’t stop with consumption: the app takes what it knows about good videos and their component parts to promote the creation of more good videos. First, know that your goal as a TikTokker is to make videos that will land on For You Pages worldwide and rack up as many views, likes, and follows as possible. TikTok wants this too — and wants to help. For example, during video creation, creators might wade through TikTok’s infinite library of Sounds to choose their audio track by browsing the Sound menu. “Recommended” Sounds are displayed at the top of the menu followed by Sounds playlists with names like “TikTok Viral”, “New Releases”, and “Emerging Artists”, guiding users towards the Sounds TikTok has deemed most likely to trend. Creators might also discover Sounds from videos on their FYP, pre-approved by TikTok on the merits of their FYP appearance, then save them for later use in their Sound favorites, or film immediately with the sound via the obvious video creation “Use this sound” entry point from the Sound page. The app similarly turns its algorithms towards creators by suggesting specific Stickers and Hashtags during the video creation flow. This feedback loop between consumption and creation engineers videos to satisfy viewers.
While I am primarily a consumer of social — my instagram boasts a whopping zero posts — in testing TikTok’s creation I was struck by the tools at my disposal. At the risk of losing my narrative to Sound reverence, the last comment I’ll make about TikTok’s most innovative and objectively best feature is that it drops the creation bar on the floor. Sounds save creators from the thinking required to develop novel video concepts and catapult them to virality in a system that favors the best take over the original. Features like Duets, in which creators film split-screen next to another TikTok video, and Stitches, in which creators can use clips of other TikTok videos in their own, promote easy creation through collaboration. Newly released TikTok filters become the focus of video challenges as creators flock to film the same trends. These tools make TikTok a fun platform to create. They also promote video same-ness, together with recommendations, as great content perpetuates its own re-creation.
TikTokkers are prolific creators, themselves a microcosm of the app they depend on, selling personal brands instead of ads. I start to recognize the superstars by their millions of followers: real-life celebrities, Vine and Musical.ly holdouts turned TikTokkers, YouTubers making a digital land grab, and those born of TikTok. I also see lots of videos on my FYP from creators I don’t recognize and never see again. While the majority of creators are not paid, the egalitarian promise of FYP fame fuels creation for the everyman. The FYP rewards content over celebrity and, coupled with easy creation and the app’s public nature, TikTok seems to deliver more likes, views and follows for the average user than clout-centric YouTube and Instagram. The app’s algorithms even take on an unexpected meta role as the subject of videos, whose creators elevate math to mysticism and spark challenges to “unlock” TikTok’s algorithms — most often, certain Sounds hold this power — for more FYP views. Painfully, a creator’s best strategy here may be inactivity, since TikTok, in an absolutely unconfirmed but believable theory, is rumored to boost FYP appearances when a former creator’s activity wanes.
Deleting TikTok doesn’t fix all our problems
Let’s bring our PM back to have her shot at defining Value. Product managers like to think in terms of customer problems: what are my customers trying to do, and how could I help them? Through this framing, TikTok offers entertainment for my boredom, online connection for my loneliness, and creative tools for my need for expression. This is where it starts to fall apart. Our age of digital distraction, isolation, and online identity performance illustrates an over-rotation towards these solutions, propelled by the ease of our own digital monetization. Are these really the problems we need help with? Further, today’s business environment necessitates companies like TikTok not just profit, but maximize revenue and user growth at all costs to attract investments and placate shareholders, disincentivizing the self-regulation that, if done in earnest, would almost certainly require us to put down our phones. Only the established behemoths with money to burn can afford this luxury, slowly rebuilding ethics into their products against conflicting and perpetually higher company priorities.
My answer to “What makes TikTok so addictive?” is that TikTok is a master attention harvester. Strategic bets on Music plus Video and a metrics-driven competent team created a semi-autonomous, self-reinforcing mobile entertainment machine that expertly extracts and resells our attention. Through answering my question, I have become overwhelmed with more. What is compulsive app use doing to us biologically, psychologically and evolutionarily? What would incentivize companies to build more ethically? TikTok predecessors Google and Facebook initially rejected ad-based business models, but as Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants illustrates, mobile advertising is just the latest incarnation of attention harvesting, which has long been encroaching on us, moving from billboards, print and TV into our personhood through the internet and our phones. As an individual, I also wonder: what I can do? How can I abstain without being socially, informationally, and economically ostracized? I don’t answer these questions here, but I can point you to Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, a wildly creative and well-researched exploration of our options as individuals. I also implore you for book suggestions that tackle these questions, and, unironically, for claps.
I am still not immune to TikTok’s charms, but I accept this, as a human with limited control over my attention and a growing understanding of how it’s being ripped from me. Even in TikTokking for research, I got carried away watching videos when I’d only intended to take a screenshot of the Sounds library #SoundGang. On one such occasion, TikTok showed me a different type of Video that i’m still thinking about: a PSA from @tiktoktips with 11 million likes telling me mercifully to “Take a Break from scrolling! The videos will be there tomorrow, it’s getting late!”. It pulled me back into consciousness and I closed the app, relieved. But now, I’m not sure. Perhaps, TikTok was offering a lifeline, unable to ignore the universality of the impulse-swiping problem it created. Or maybe, TikTok recognized the behavior of a user about to go cold turkey and didn’t want to lose me again.
