It's not the "wholesomeness" that's unique to China, but the commitment to maintain that wholesomeness systematically as an platform identity which is a trained

It's not the "wholesomeness" that's unique to China, but the commitment to maintain that wholesomeness systematically as an platform identity which is a trained requisite for surviving Chinese censorship. The issue with many western media platform is they start off wholesome like TikTok but inevitably reach Eternal September criticality with unconstrained growth. Western moderation philosophy is typically to let this run, eyeballs at all cost, until they're forced to respond incrementally to outside forces. This alienates the masses who don't care for the fringe drama. The Chinese model is preemptively tame the space because censorship board diktat is arbitrary so best to constrain space. This accommodates the masses and alienates fringe voices. The enforcement tools use to mean unsophisticated mass deletion, but now there are systems of shadowban, limiting promotion of material etc, i.e. tons of steps to curtail "problematic" content before banhammer. The latter is rarely exercised in west, because other strategies seem to work well enough. This isn't to say masses won't get tired of TikTok eventually like every other media platform, but that it's content philosophy does make it stand out from western counterparts which might explain it's popularity. People are hooked TikTok because it doesn't feel like it's heading towards Eternal September, but maybe it's only a matter time.