TikTok Is Destroying Itself From the Inside Out – By Thomas Germain (Gizmodo) / Feb 5, 2024
TikTok is fumbling critical business partnerships and cluttering its app with unpopular features. It could be the beginning of the end.
At the beginning of 2023, TikTok was one of the weirdest and most delightful places on the internet. An app with a reputation for memes and 30-second dances had become the front page of the internet, and it seemed TikTok was only getting better as the platform matured. A year later, TikTok’s growth finally appears to have plateaued, and while the app is still a cultural behemoth, there’s a surprising truth lurking in the app’s success: TikTok is in trouble. In a bid to spread into new areas and fend off competitors, TikTok is crowding its app with irksome features, pushing content that detracts from the app’s core experience, and alienating its base of once-loyal users. Social media success is a delicate balance, and if TikTok isn’t careful, it could destroy itself from the inside out.
The most obvious example is the TikTok Shop. The company is pushing its eCommerce so hard you hear about it more than any other topic on the app, both in ads and organic videos from creators hoping for a share of the profits. The app is even testing a new feature that uses AI to identify products in the background of regular content and turn every single video into an ad.
Then there’s the videos themselves. In a bid to compete with YouTube, TikTok is reportedly preparing to allow users to post 30-minute videos and prompting creators to upload horizontal content instead of the app’s standard vertical format. TikTok is even encouraging people to upload photo slideshows instead of videos altogether. On top of that, TikTok just fumbled a relationship with Universal Music Group, which pulled its music catalog off the platform and silenced any video featuring Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, and every other Universal artist.
In other words, it seems that TikTok has completely lost sight of what made people fall in love with the app in the first place: short-form videos in a format that pushed people to be creative and weird. Outrage is brewing among a growing contingent of users who post videos arguing TikTok is ruined now, and analysts say the company is jeopardizing its success.
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