Thank you for voicing this, I really agree that something about the culture growing up around tiktok is special and feels like a breath of fresh air. I think a lot of the doom and gloom talk is coming from people with a totally outside perspective who haven't actually tried to engage with the platform.
One thing that stands out as special to me, since it started out as an app for dance videos, so much of the cultural threads still revolve around that, and so it encourages an embodied way of presenting yourself. It makes text heavy sites like twitter and facebook feel... detached, cerebral, sterile in comparison. Whereas tiktok keeps a playful frivolity that that is so often lacking online. It seems to me a big step towards solving the big challenge with "online culture": considering the human.
One thing that stands out as special to me, since it started out as an app for dance videos, so much of the cultural threads still revolve around that, and so it encourages an embodied way of presenting yourself. It makes text heavy sites like twitter and facebook feel... detached, cerebral, sterile in comparison. Whereas tiktok keeps a playful frivolity that that is so often lacking online. It seems to me a big step towards solving the big challenge with "online culture": considering the human.