TikTok has lost the plot

TikTok used to be the innovator. Now, they are scrambling to keep up. So what changed?

I want to start out by saying that I have loved TikTok and been a champion of it since you could only upload 15-second videos. I remember being embarrassed when my first job outside of college was to run a company’s TikTok account because someone told me that, “no new jobs will take you seriously with TikTok on your resume”.

But thank God I stuck with it. Because of TikTok, I got hired at BuzzFeed as their first-ever “short form video strategist”. Aka I was hired to run their TikTok, which shortly became their Reels and Shorts, as other platforms copied suit.

What was TikTok’s magic touch? ✨

At a point, TikTok was the new, cool kid on the block. They were the shiny, new toy on the playground that no one really knew how to play with yet but the mystery made it addicting.

They were trailblazers. They threw all the rules of algorithms out the window and brought a completely new wave of content creation. The ease of posting created a generation of content creators like never before. In the past, the only people who had the privilege of becoming influencers were people who had access to cameras, editing software, laptops, hard drives and more.

With TikTok, they threw out the concept of followers with the FYP. They threw out the concept of gatekeeping by making the platform easy for even the newest of users to post videos. They threw out the concept of copyright free music and instead created a new environment where record labels were begging and paying creators to use their artist’s music, instead of penalizing them for it.

TikTok was a disruptor. But now, they are desperately hanging on to the status quo.

I went to a TikTok Summit yesterday. There, I was excited to learn about what features they will be pushing and new trends they see on the horizon before all the other platforms. While they did provide some great insights, which I will get into on the podcast Monday, I was shocked at how…different the energy felt. It wasn’t the TikTok I once recognized.

Here is where they went wrong and how, I think, they can get their spark back:

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