I used TikTok and posted videos on it for about three months last summer. I was mostly posting nature education stuff and replying to people's questions about m

I used TikTok and posted videos on it for about three months last summer. I was mostly posting nature education stuff and replying to people's questions about math. I wasn't going gangbusters, but growth was positive and obvious. Certainly a lot faster than any other platform I've been on. Plus, the community is super interactive. Even as an upstart, I was getting replies from popular accounts to my replies to their posts. You can say just about anything about the content on TikTok. There's vapid stuff. There's funny stuff. There's informative stuff. There's insightful stuff. It's all there and you can easily shape your feed to whatever you want. But there's also a lot of really dark stuff. And by that I mean how TikTok themselves interact with people. I once got suspended for updating my profile to say I liked Star Trek. I'd randomly get content warnings and videos removed for "sexual" content for videos that didn't even contain any people. And I was only experiencing the tip of the iceberg. I saw several popular accounts get banned, often for "sexual content" or "harassment", of people who did nothing of the sort. And of course, appeals for review were always useless. There are a lot of hidden anti-features in TikTok, too. User accounts exist in different classes, based on follower count (undocumented, naturally). Certain features don't get unlocked until you hit a certain number of followers. I got high enough that I could post 3 minute videos, but I never got high enough that I was allowed to put a link to my website in my bio (that got me another suspension). New accounts get spread further, more often, to give you a dopamine boost of attention that you end up chasing with no insight into why your viewership is dwindling even though you're learning and posting better videos. Various hidden rate limits are in place that can trigger account suspensions if you do something like edit your bio too many times in a row (like, maybe cuz you're fixing a typo). There are shadow suspensions, too, where going over a certain quota of posts means your subsequent posts won't show up in anyone's feeds, which can happen easily if you're having fun with making reply chains. And always. Always the complete lack of human review. It became really clear that the "report user" button is being abused to brigade people off of the app. As I said, I saw several popular accounts get banned for trumped up charges, with some extremely worrying patterns emerging regarding the race, sex, and sexual orientation of said accounts (and never any of their content, that I could ever tell). TikTok is an amazing app and community. But TikTok is also an extremely terrible company. For that reason, I gave up on it, and I strongly discouraging getting started with it.