Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don’t make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you “engaged” with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.
This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you’d stare at the longest with a “heating tool” that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms […]
For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn’t give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).
It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those “content creators” are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms’ owners and executives. They may be more “engaging” than your friends, but they’re also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.
What’s a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is “AI creators”. An “AI creator” is like a “creator” in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a “creator”, it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform’s shareholders and executives. It’s the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people […]
But there’s a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms’ single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so “sticky”. The platforms don’t “hack your dopamine loops” – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can’t even agree on what board-game you’re going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it’s time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?
So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.
But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends’ unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.
Cory Doctorow, “Tiktokification shall set us free”, Pluralistic, 2026-04-17.
July 21, 2026
QotD: Why Tiktok?
Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: ArtificialIntelligence, Enshittification, Facebook, Psychology, SocialMedia, Twitter — Nicholas @ 01:00
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