5 Reasons Why TikTok Dominated 2022

My first experience with TikTok came from my teenage neighbours. They would do silly choreographed lip-syncs in the backyard like there was no tomorrow! My younger boys would attempt to squeeze in obscene gestures in the video's background.

For some reason, TikTok was all the rage. When I decided to become a content creator last Summer, I created a TikTok 100% because I wanted to impress my kids.

We shot a silly video featuring our rabbits as a metaphor for cybersecurity. It turned out well. I boosted it. Within a day, it gathered a thousand likes! My sons went to summer camp telling their friends about our viral rabbits! Mission accomplished: I was cool.

Why TikTok? What makes this social network stand out? How has it caught the imagination of a whole generation in a few years? Should we be worried about TikTok? Let's try to find out as I recap how 2022 was the year where TikTok went, huh, well, viral.

🧓 1. Facebook is Getting Old and Official

Facebook lost all its cool the day my baby-boomer mother joined. Facebook is the place to keep in touch with people you meet in real life. It's this social media's double-edged sword. Having access to the daily thoughts of family, coworkers, or college mates can go downhill fast.

Everybody is on Facebook. It cannot remain a pocket of creativity where you let it all hang out.

I saw it firsthand when I bought Meta ads for this website. I spent double the amount on Facebook versus Instagram. The latter yielded a threefold increase in engagement. We sold our old baby toys in days on the Facebook marketplace, though.

The numbers back this up. I wrote last July about TikTok's dominance:

Don't get me wrong, Facebook can still thrive as a business. It's the modern church porch! But the cool ideas happen in the fringes.

🐵 2. All imitators fail to understand what makes TikTok tick

"To monkey" someone, in French, means to imitate in an annoying way. That's what I kept seeing in 2022: Google, Meta, and Amazon monkeying TikTok. The YouTube Short and Instagram Reels were shameless ripoffs. I reported Amazon tested a feed for its app back in August. The shopping behemoth launched it as Inspire last week. Even Google plans to "TikTok-ize" its search page, as I reported in September!

My story Apple Remains The Infinite Player stays as relevant as ever. Great companies like Apple compete against themselves, as Simon Sinek explains.

What these companies failed to understand is that TikTok's success does not come from its short-video format or the swipe-ups. These are merely features! TikTok's silliness contrasts with influencer-heavy YouTube, ad-heavy Amazon and attractive-people-heavy Instagram. The interface makes video editing easy on mobile. Its humourous filters complete the picture. It's a full product. Imitations are not.

TikTok's feed algorithm impresses even more. I have been using the app daily for 6 months now. I have yet to see a teenager floss on an LMFAO track. The recommendations algorithms kick off after very few events and, perhaps more importantly, seem less hooked on global trends than Twitter for example. That "digging into your niche" effect gets amplified by...

🌇 3. The Twilight of the Influencers

Kim Kardashian became famous thanks to her friendship with Paris Hilton in the early 2000s. Her rise was orchestrated by PR strategists and her business-savvy mother. This is the "traditional" way to fame where individuals leverage connections to dominate content distribution, as Sam Lessin points out. Television and magazines were the gatekeepers who decided who would show up in everybody's homes.

No wonder Kylie Jenner, who inherited her massive fame from being in Kim's entourage, made a petition to "Make Instagram Instagram Again" when it became a TikTok clone. Lessin called it the "algorithmic everyone". TikTok's algorithm blew up the gatekeepers. I reported on this back in August by empathizing with Jenner whose livelihood is threatened by reactionary moves from product managers.

Instagram will experience this tension from now on. An industry of lifestyle rests on its algorithm. But basing recommendations on content rather than influencers seem to generate better engagement!  

🎈 4. Everybody is Desperate for the Next Big Thing

I covered BeReal first in July. The social media marketed as the "anti-Instagram" ended up as the App Store's 2022's #1 app! I admit I was skeptical, though BeReal seems an exception rather than the rule. Gas, the anonymous app where high schoolers can send each other messages, seems to have run out of gas. I reported in October how monetization would be Gas' challenge. Shuffle, from Pinterest, had a highly-mediatized launch but is not making waves right now.

If we look further out, does anyone remember the audio-only app Clubhouse? What about Houseparty/Meerkat? Yubo, anyone?

That's not to say these apps will fail! Let's face it: traditional media hates Meta for draining all its ad revenue. They are out for blood whenever a new fad creeps.

TikTok's numbers don't lie. It is making a dent in Meta's figures. This will always generate press.

🇨🇳 5. Ethical and Privacy Issues Must be Discussed

Much discussion happened around TikTok's parent, China's ByteDance, having access to user data. At the end of the year, TikTok finally added China as a location where geolocation data could be accessed. Its cloud service provider, Oracle, audited its algorithms for the presence of Chinese government propaganda. The same week, a security researcher revealed TikTok's in-app browser had permission to record users' keyboards. The FBI closed the year by warning about how TikTok could be weaponized by foreign governments' "influence ops" to manipulate public opinion. Talk about a hot topic!

I offered a positive outlook on the phenomena back in August:

Considering the debacle that was the Twitter Whistleblower allegations, and 2021's Facebook papers, I stand by what I wrote. Standards have evolved. While our laws are far from perfect, the question of user privacy stays a core concept in the development of ad-driven websites.

TikTok's upcoming move into music streaming could reveal new revenue streams which are less dependent on targeting.

Those considerations feel like a good point to conclude with a list of recommendations I made in 2022 about TikTok and social media.

1. Go directly to the customer. Don't make these platforms your main revenue source.
2. Don't use TikTok if you are a potential person of interest, especially a journalist.
3. Assume everything you do on TikTok is being collected and used to target advertisements to you.
4. Everything you post on TikTok is public and permanent. The silly Toto Karaoke bit will follow you into university!
5. Lift your head up every once in a while. The algorithm is meant to push you into a rabbit hole.
6. You are not missing out if you do not have a TikTok account. Most of the content is for entertainment purposes.
7. Take TikTok for what it's worth. It's a mobile-first video-sharing app that allows normal people to express themselves easily.

Let's be grateful that millions of people found an outlet for their creativity in 2022. I was one of them.

🥊 Quick Hits

• 🤗 Essential GPT Cheat Detector. Share with teachers now: https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/
• Apple will offer end-to-end encryption of iCloud and has abandoned its controversial system to flag child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on iPhones. Critics argued that CSAM filtering was being used as a Motte-and-bailey fallacy to justify giving the FBI an encryption backdoor on iPhones. (Story)
• Microsoft' Bing lost the "iPhone default search engine" bidding war to Google, again. Microsoft's answer is to plot a "super app" that will do everything so people will not be compelled to use Google. Yes, you read that right. Microsoft is reacting like any superhero vilain of the past 20 years. (Story)
• Here is a weird NYT piece on how computer science graduates will need to "settle" for jobs in lesser known tech companies, finance, or the automotive industry. As someone who got his start in the financial sector before moving to a "lesser known" tech company, I would like to tell these students it will be fine: there are great problems to solve outside of Meta, Google et al. Plus, Big Tech hoarding less talent might be beneficial for the economy at large. (Story)
• Cities still have no clue how to deal with remote work, calling it an "Office Apocalypse". I suggested how offices of the future will need to promote mindfulness and connection. The article proposes to apply the same principles to urbanism. I'm all for this. (Story)

More dog parks!

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