TikTok Is on the Decline
Reading Time: 4 minutesI’m Calling It Now: TikTok’s on the Decline. Here’s Why., I’m calling it now. Here’s what convinced me., TikTok is finally on the decline. Here’s why.
Don’t look now, but after half a decade of transforming public life on an international scale, TikTok may finally be entering its flop era.
The clues are there if you know where to look, even outside the millions of videos that have lapsed into total silence since Universal Music Group yanked its vast catalog from the app, including Taylor Swift, J Balvin, your favorite city pop pioneers, and so many others. The professed reason was to deny the app a chance to train artificial intelligence on commercial music without compensating artists—which, fair enough. Yet it’s not just the songs that have left these videos; it’s the entire audio altogether, leading to the loss of creator narration on both old and new TikToks.
Then, there’s also the sharp slowdown in user growth over the past year, widespread annoyance with its ad-heavy push into e-commerce via the ‘TikTok Shop,’ impatience with its never-ending deluge of A.I.–generated spam and misinformation, exhaustion with the homogenizing effects of TikTok trends and aesthetics, increased apprehension over its demeaning A.I.–powered face filters, outrage at its rumormongering automated-search suggestions, and concern over the heightened prevalence of conspiratorial ‘health’-focused influencers. Turmoil is coming from inside the house too, with layoffs and a gender-discrimination lawsuit hitting both TikTok and its parent company—the latter of which reported significant drops in revenue growth and overall valuation at the tail end of 2023. Oh, and: President Joe Biden has finally joined the app to reach the youths. The result is as cringe as it sounds, as my colleague Scott Nover pointed out.
TikTok is not anywhere near dead or dying; it’s more that you can sense a less-than-ideal vibe shift on the platform. With its revenue increasingly driven by consumer spending, you can expect TikTok to push even harder into Shop-like ventures, through exclusive subscription spaces or paid-for benefits like the ability to upload longer videos, even as it continues to slash its already-measly payouts to videomakers and musicians. Because, even though the app still takes in heaping amounts of ad revenue, its new request for agencies to increase their app spending isn’t going over great with advertising executives. That may be thanks, in part, to the geopolitical firestorms occurring even outside home nation China: The app’s image-making prowess is universally credited with assisting the recent electoral successes of strongmen in the Philippines, Argentina, and Indonesia. It’s a rickety situation in the United States as well: Politicians like Sen. John Fetterman, who once actively courted the app’s many youth organizers, are now parroting unfounded talking points about how TikTok is turning those very activists into Hamas surrogates. (Fetterman has not posted any new videos to his profile since making those comments in December.)
Around this time last year, I thought that the prospect of a national TikTok ban appeared more likely than it had in the past, thanks to bipartisan China hawkery and a string of state-level app-use restrictions, including failed attempts at outright local bans. (For what it’s worth, a plurality of U.S. adults still approve of booting TikTok from domestic borders.) The counterpressure from influencers may have persuaded Biden to step back from that and bring Dark Brandon to short-form video—but there’s a real question as to whether Biden already missed the app’s peak moment among his youth constituents.
Again, TikTok has unquestionably retained a massive cultural impact; the past months’ crazes over pricey tote bags, influencer-approved restaurants, orange peels, the ‘Brexit Tackle,’ and Stanley cups are just a few among many viable examples. But TikTok is also pissing off its high-profile users with its newer features, losing one of its primary avenues of cultural influence (i.e., the ability to make artists’ careers and revive the popularity of older songs), and blatantly imitating rival platforms Twitch and YouTube, through the emphases on longer videos and livestreaming. It’s not great for an app that, per a recent Pew Research Center survey, still lags behind even Pinterest (Pinterest!) in overall stateside use. The stark gaps in demographic uptake—only a quarter of Americans above 30 claim to ever use the app, compared with 62 percent of Zoomers—aren’t likely to change either, as long-established platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X/Twitter ape more and more of TikTok’s addictive features for themselves. YouTube is already twisting the UMG knife by offering creators the opportunity to remix music videos directly into the TikTok-like ‘Shorts’ they can post on the platform.
The factor that really propelled TikTok into the cultural stratosphere was its wondrous ability to fill the gaps left behind by other, increasingly corroded social networks. But now TikTok appears to be undercutting itself even here. We all know that Google search sucks now, which is why TikTok became Gen Z’s search engine of choice—but how long will that last if TikTok’s suggested searches keep worsening? Spotify’s algorithm tweaks and staff cuts made organic music discovery much harder—but with the UMG dispute, musicians aren’t going to find a savior in TikTok’s once-golden spontaneity. TikTok’s smooth, absorbing scroll was a welcome counter to Instagram’s ad saturation—at least, until TikTok began choking feeds with even more frequent ads. Online services everywhere are deluged with A.I. slurry—and TikTok is no exception. And while TikTok might be Zoomers’ news source of choice, thanks to their growing distrust of traditional media, the proliferation of rampant disinformation and far-right propaganda might just be setting up another fake-news ecosystem.
Maybe by this point next year, TikTok will have righted all these wrongs and persevered in its path to world domination. But if I had to put money on it, I find it much more likely that we’ve all witnessed the peak of the app’s innovation, and we should start wondering what on earth might be coming for us next.
Ref: slate
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