I Used to Love TikTok, But in 2024 It Just Feels Cringe

Over the weekend, I saw a screenshot from a viral video going around on Reddit. So, I did something I hadn’t done in a few weeks: opened my TikTok app to watch it.

Not to be that guy, but I came to TikTok early. A colleague in my previous role at BuzzFeed News turned me onto the app when it had just merged with Musical.ly in the latter part of 2018. It’s an actually fun place on the internet, I remember her telling me. No one’s trying to sell you anything. No children are being exploited. It’s just a bunch of high school and college kids making jokes.

For a few years, it was. Then, COVID-19 hit, and the platform genuinely exploded. Everyone and their (literal) mother was downloading the app, doing the “Savage” dance, and making skits about being “bored in the house, in the house bored.” Teenagers like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae started going mega-viral on the app, and soon became household names. It was a good time, and I now think those years represented the golden age of TikTok.

It’s all been downhill from here.

Sure, TikTok is currently a place to make a lot of money. It is also somewhere people, especially young people, spend a lot of time. It’s the center of culture in many respects, and the stats don’t lie. TikTok itself claims that over 1 billion people “regularly” come to its app, and 67% of American teens reported they use it in a 2023 study by Pew Research. Stories abound about all the industries TikTok is supplanting for the younger generations, from completely upending the music industry to film, television, and (sob) news. From a business perspective, Digiday reported last month that ad spending is expected to increase by as much as 25% in 2024, though it notes the ad spend on TikTok is still a “drop in the bucket” compared to how much is spent on platforms like Meta.

So, if that’s the case, why do I find it so utterly lifeless, and so devoid of anything entertaining lately? If TikTok is the center of attention for so much of the cultural conversation, why do I open it, get bored, cringe, and leave? Why does scrolling through it feel more like homework?