TikTok – App Review
Social Media is addictive. In some form, everyone I know of (including people who are my 3rd connections) have all been either a user or a contributor. Tiktok is a lot more than just a platform to connect with people. You can get high up with the acting or dubbing skills and all with fun tonic. I tried Tiktok for the last couple of weeks and here are my concentrated thoughts around it:
Features:
- Millions of videos from various categories are available.
- Effects , Filters, Features available easily and are quite easy for any ordinary person to curate their content the way they want.
- To make it more entertaining the videos have readily available library of famous dialogues, narrations, songs and music from different series, movies, other videos etc.
- People can save the video for themselves and edit them later or post it out in public.
- No hassle to search a video keeps playing one after the other based on the kind of videos you watch or people you follow.
- Easy swipe features let you move to other content smoothly.
- Privacy? Not sure, but Tiktok has some options to block, unfollow, limit getting messages or comments from followers, stop people from doing duet etc. available.
- The time size of the videos do not exceed 15-20 seconds.
My Thoughts on the Pros and Cons of such Apps :
Pros:
1. Entry barrier is very low. Anyone and everyone can make charming videos. Its video editing has a varied variety of filters to make the content how you would want it to be. Compared to other such platforms, where any video that needs to be uploaded must go through some very good video editing software. Only people who have good skills with it or can afford it can have an ease of entry to those platforms.
2. Timeline of the content is quite small. People don’t need to spend in a lot of time to focus on the quality of the video and still continue to have a high engagement. Other platforms need at least 3-5 mins to get attract high engagement.
3. Technology has now penetrated multiple levels deep (at least in India) where thinking of a good internet, electricity etc. is still hard. Tiktok just needs some basic internet and a smart phone. Infact the highest engagement in terms of contributors is from Tier 2 , 3 cities and small villages of India. Its amazing to see these contributors have followers like 20-30 Million followers. (Would have been impossible anywhere else).
Cons :
1. Since the content time is so small it decreases our attention/ focus time. In general humans – adults have around 20 minutes on average.
2. Continuously watching such small videos brings down our concentration time. This makes our brain hard to focus on larger contents and grasp more like reading a book, watching a long series for long, long focus on work etc.
3. Since Tiktok keeps curating the content and automatically pushes in the next content, our brain becomes passive. Unlike other social media apps like Youtube or even Netflix , Amazon Prime etc. there is a huge library of content that users atleast need to choose what to watch. However, that doesnt hold true for Tiktok. It keeps pushing content out to you to watch either from what you previously watched or from the one’s you follow. Literally making our brain – dead!
4. Watching such videos also brings a momentary release of dopamine – an enzyme when secreted increases our happiness level. I am not joking, some videos actually made me laugh out so hard that it made me continuously watch more such videos. In turn, making us “Addictive”.
Overall, I find it’s a fun app. Great platform to have a huge engagement. I am intrigued by the number of people just in India -20 Million, who are the users and contributors to this platform which I feel has made it enter the mainstream technology. I will continue to have my shots of Dopamine whenever I need some break 🙂 However, we should know when and how to stop.