I know this is one man's anecdote - but TikTok somehow lost that early magic. I remember it in 2018 and it was much wilder than it is now. It would regularly gi

I know this is one man's anecdote - but TikTok somehow lost that early magic. I remember it in 2018 and it was much wilder than it is now. It would regularly give me some pretty far-out content and the algorithm would mix it together into a surreal yet cohesive package. In many ways it was a much worse objective experience back then, the duetting which was pervasive at the time often became pretty intense bullying. But it was often genuinely surprising in an almost Monty Python-esque kind of way. Now I feel they have sanitized it pretty well, and the volume of creators means that each niche is overfull with middle-brow content. I think that has left little room for the truly bizarre stuff that lurks to come out into the light. It still manages to keep me stuck to the screen for hours at a time (the reason I very rarely dare to open the app at all) but I don't have the same belly laugh experience I did when I first used the app. I walk away less often thinking to myself: "what the hell just happened". Mostly it serves me pretty tame content. I mean, this really just feels like textbook case of Enshittification [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification