#4: Watching all of your Liked TikToks
I watched all 2,000 TikToks I've Liked over the last three years, which is really not the app's intended experience as it turns out.
Everything I need to be happy —a great cook, a loving partner, a total beefcake — I left somewhere in my Liked TikToks.
I’ve Liked 2,114 since downoading the app in 2020, tapping the little heart button that acknowledges my appreciation of the video (imagine a little pat on the head, a glow of pride) while banishing it to unsearchable purgatory. Every time I Like a TikTok, it’s with 100% certainy I’ll retrieve it someday. As if that had ever happened, even one time!
Maybe this isn’t how everyone Likes TikToks. I’ve seen some of you freaks bare your digital hearts for everything that crosses your feed. But it’s how I Like, and I don’t think I’m alone. I don’t just worry I’ll miss out on a great workout or forget an important statistic. I worry about what happens to TikToks after they leave my feed. What if they get lonely in there?? With every Like further diminishing my chances of unearthing any one video, I needed to act fast.
I spent the last month watching every one of my Liked TikToks — 18 hours in ten sittings — and documenting the process. What I learned about my personal history with the the app, about the Likes page, about the reason we Like anything at all, materialized from that fear I described. I thought we Liked things to save them. How naive I was.
You always start at the top of your Likes page, so if I got kicked from the app for any reason I had scroll and search for the thumbnail I left off on. Hundreds of TikToks in, that process took several minutes. Deleted sounds had me watching skits in eerie silence. This is not the app’s intended experience. To put it a different way, Liking is a core user experience of TikTok, but Likes are basically neglected. I counted that 2,114 figure by hand.
My ground rules were sparse: I’d watch all of every video, and give the app my full attention. After retreading the “indomitable human spirit” era, I established one more. I know we’re all super world-weary and ironic and feeling things about the internet is bad, but this trend actually moved me. I said affirmations. I did stretches at the window. I remember it really fondly. Now I’m scrolling through 35 heartrending quotes about love, about going on, and at one point I knew I’d remember them forever and now they’re sitting around with this.
So I set myself to task, using the Bookmarks feature to save and sort everything in my Liked feed that I could imagine using. I postulated that, if Likes are for saving TikToks, then a Bookmark is a Super Duper Like. Not only do Bookmarks save videos just like Likes do, but you can group Bookmarked videos into named collections. The feature was added to the For You page’s side panel in spring 2022 — had it been around earlier, I reasoned, users would have forgone Liking altogether. Now I had the opportunity to undo years of bad archival habits.
At first, I discriminated. Collections like “Recipes” and “Workouts” became exemplars, justifying the quest I’d put myself on. Quickly, the collections got weirder. Does this go in “All time jokes” or “Life affirming”? When does a song go from “Songs” to “Art,” or maybe “Relevant to the Substack”? One of the exemplars, “Recipes,” became a great case study for the hole in my thinking.
For plenty of recipes, the Bookmark approach actually worked well! I now have a tidy little video cookbook of about 100 entries. I even made some of them over the course of this project. This felt good, it’s exactly why I contemplated any of this in the first place.
Beyond those hundred budget-friendly, clearly instructional, resource unintensive recipes, the Super Duper Like theory started to crumble. I Liked the same garlic soup recipe four times. Emily Mariko, after posting her 82 million-view salmon rice bowl, proceeded to rack up tens of millions of views in videos where she made the same rice bowl. Imagine reading some dessert recipe out of a cookbook and going, “Wow, that seems great!,” only to flip several pages and find the same recipe. It’s nonsensical in any other medium.
In fact, TikTok cooks may list their ingredients and describe all the steps, but there’s no intention that you the viewer would actually make what it is they’re making. Remember those cottagecore videos that start with dumping pounds of hand-picked produce into an industrial farmhouse sink, to the tune of La Vie en rose? Cooking as a spectacle isn’t new at all, but it’s interesting how TikTok generalized this format across many different art forms. Ginger Root did a “how to make a music video” video that’s basically just a promotion for their (very good) music video. The format may already have a name, but I’ve been calling it “instructional theater.”
So you have recipes that are never meant to be made, and you have the same recipes being made on the same accounts over and over. And this isn’t a quirk of recipe TikTok: intensive how-tos in music video production, digital art and animation; the same jokes made again and again, the same punchlines, the same dances. To make matters even more ridiculous, I found myself completely unwilling to un-Like anything on my feed. Four garlic soups? What if they get lonely!
Here’s where I went wrong: I no longer believe that the basic unit of TikTok is the TikTok. One video on its own accomplishes nothing. Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote, “when i scroll on tiktok or whatever, i can’t get away from the feeling that almost nothing there is really meant to be loved — it’s just meant to be snorted, basically, and occasionally to get you to buy something.” And I think that’s because everything you see on the app is designed to be replaced by something else. Because the Likes page isn’t worth navigating, because Bookmarks capture only a very small genre of video, because TikTok’s search function is bogus and because you won’t see the next ad unless you keep scrolling. The atom of social media — what’s supposed to be loved — is the feed.
Take artists who have established their craft on social media. Take Dril. Dril isn’t a writer who made a Twitter account to promote his work, and he’s not a singer who brought an already substantial following to the platform. He is, as Horse_ebooks creator Jacob Bakkila describes these artists, a “poster.” Painters paint, dancers dance, and posters like Dril, Bakkila, Derek Estevez-Olsen, and Darcie Wilder post.
You probably know a Dril tweet, but his art isn’t the pursuit of one magnificent tweet. Instead, he’s created a persona that he reinforces every time he tweets. When Twitter’s legs shrivel inward to show that it’s finally dead, the product of Dril’s art will have been the character he created, not any one tweet. It’s why posters are so well-poised to narrate the evolving landscape of the internet, and why some of their greatest moments respond to current events in such a way as to be completely irrelevant or nonsensical a week from now. You just had to be there.
Posting is a kind of performance art. You aren’t “the person who made the salmon rice bowl.” You are “the person who makes salmon rice bowls.” As long as you never deviate, your identity on the app stays secure.
Mariko’s case also explains the instructional theater format since, unlike Dril, she is a YouTuber-turned-TikToker rather than a native poster. She came to TikTok seeking an audience on YouTube, not TikTok. The app is maybe the worst platform for community building — it limits users’ ability to see videos from accounts they follow, shuns artists for taking chances, pushes audiences to keep scrolling, and pays poorly — but if your number comes up, you’re guaranteed bulk attention. It’s an exposure lottery on the grandest scale.
If you think of it like busking, artists can go onto TikTok and busk for literally anything, not just music and juggling. Advice, activism, standup, cooking, fashion, travel, painting, dog training, anime recommendations — I mean, god, imagine if you could put out a hat and just tell people to watch Tatami Galaxy. All you have to do is film the creative process, the how-to, and from there ask viewers to subscribe on a platform where that actually matters. This arrangement supports a literal billion dollar industry for dozens of identical link-in-bio services.
Posters and hyperbuskers demonstrate TikTok at its most functional, but they don’t represent most of the app’s volume. Most are from people who don’t even consider what they’re doing to be an act of artistic creation.1 They were just in a parking lot with some friends, someone said something funny, and they thought it would fun to make a TikTok out of it.
When I think of videos like this (and photo reels, and microblogs), I think of Josh Riedel. Riedel claimed the username josh as an Instagram beta tester. He’s battled poachers for the title since 2010, and has turned down six-digit offers for his account. He weathers it all because there’s part of himself on Instagram that he doesn’t want to lose. “My photos and videos and Stories and captions offer a log of my life. I can scroll through and think, Yes, this is me.”
Riedel points to a concept called the extended mind, which posits that things in the world — as in, physical stuff — comprise our mental processes just as much as neurons and memories. Our environments are a part of ourselves. Fish swim well not only because they’re fish-shaped, but because they know how to take advantage of eddies and currents. We rock at math because we can count on our fingers, and on our pocket calculators.
Parts of us exist in the world. We plant cuttings of ourselves in a public garden and allow them to grow without us. Creation propagates identity. Similarly, when we walk through the garden and love what we find there, we make it a part of ourselves. What we like is part of our extended mind: it’s a part of us that exists outside of us. My favorite movie is Your Name. I had nothing to do with it, but it has everything to do with me.
Maybe I’m overintellectualizing. “Likes represent, get this, liking something.” But they’re more specific than that. Liking takes a photograph of your feed at a moment in time, allowing you to express yourself on the app without actually making a TikTok. Liking takes your memory and your humor and your resolution and your morality, and it externalizes them. Sort of how your camera roll records a private log of your movement through the world, Likes record your movement through the feed.
Liking shares some DNA with hoarding behavior in that way: a fracturing of identity across your possessions, the anticipation of future use, the same sense of sentimentality that left me with four garlic soups in my cookbook. But Liking isn’t disruptive like hoarding is, and it definitely isn’t pathological. In fact, it’s a taught behavior.
Near the end of my Liked feed, where “disintegrating” was the general vibe, I watched myself learn the logic of the feed. Instead of trying to use Likes to game the For You Page (I really wanted to get into volleyball, so I went and Liked a bunch of Yuji Nishida highlight reels), I learned to take whatever the app chose to give me. I let TikTok — I let ByteDance — collaborate in the creation of my extended self. Liking became an investment, one that I used to project my identity into the app like you’d project your leg into a bear trap: I can’t leave without losing a part of myself. Ryan Broderick called this the “Vanishing Web.” We amplify ourselves across someone else’s audience, and in return they withhold the right to self-destruct. TikTok will shut its servers down one day.
This, ultimately, was why I worried so much about the lives of TikToks. When Nintendo shut down the Wii U and 3DS eShops, thousands of games would have just disappeared if not for gaming YouTuber Jirard Khalil, who spent a year and upwards of $22,000 to preserve them. A ruling against the Internet Archive restricted its ability to preserve books for reasons as tenebrous as “market harm.” (Nintendo, for its part, also went after the Internet Archive.) Even just this month, Imgur users raced to save terabytes of photos from deletion due to Imgur’s fear of dismaying advertisers with s-e-x.
In 2009, Yahoo! murdered GeoCities, at the time “the largest self-created folk-art collection in the history of the world.” This is how I thought of TikTok: a horny, flaming Library of Alexandria to be preserved.
And, personally, I struggle with appreciating transience. If I could save every conversation I’ve ever had in a big three-ring binder, I would. I struggle accepting that part of a performance’s beauty is its passing. The difference on TikTok is that, when you put the performance of your identity into the hands of a corporation, it will fail you 100% of the time.
Initially I wrote this piece as kind of a travelog. I started at day one, lowering into the sludge, and I went on until the last day to return the boon of my sludgy learnings. But the process of watching almost 20 hours of TikTok was so dreamy and liminal, I struggled to string together anything coherent. I watched my own wax-stamped memory of years in the trance of the feed. What am I supposed to take away from that?
Do I recommend watching all of your Liked TikToks? Not really. It had a bizarro knock-on effect of totally breaking me from regular usage of the app, so if you’re trying to kick a hard TikTok habit then maybe give it a try. Now, though, even accidentally backing out of a video boots me to the top of the Likes page. Doing it again would be a logistical nightmare.
What I do recommend is this: Establish yourself in a place that won’t vanish. Even if it’s on a sidewalk corner, even if it’s just you and your friends, even if it’s just you.
What I’m having fun with lately
You Must Build A Boat, a match-three RPG. I struggle with good mobile games because I have zero inhibition about playing it any time I’m bored for two seconds. Which this game totally does? But that’s not the game’s fault, it’s great.
Gideon the Ninth, the debut science fantasy novel of former Homestuck fanfic writer Tamsyn Muir and the start of her trilogy about lesbian necromancers in space. I’m totally behind on this series, but it’s super snappy. Writes cool characters very well.
Power Pak’s video about the DOOM mod MyHouse.WAD. Instantly gave me the impression of a deep and dedicated fandom that’s been cooking for like, forty years. If you like windows into niche hobbies or good creepypasta, this is a great watch.
My girlfriend somehow got us tickets to the They Might Be Giants tour that’s been sold out since 2021, and the show reminded me that it’s my favorite band. On heavy rotation this week: Where Your Eyes Don’t Go, Mr. Me, and Kiss Me, Son of God off of Lincoln, The Communists Have the Music, and Someone Keeps Moving My Chair.
Thanks for reading! Wow this piece took a ton of time, but I burned through a lot of wrong ideas before I hit on any good ones.
You know how a restaurant will be open for a few weeks before actually hosting it’s grand opening? I’m thinking one more post, and then it’s grand opening time. Look forward to it. Oh and like, share the newsletter or whatever. See you soon.
DR
So far I’ve taken it as a given that TikTok is an art form. Maybe that’s controversial? But on the other end of every TikTok there’s someone who did an extremely embarrassing thing, and that’s decide that something in them could affect some other person. They decided to make something. Flaubert or Fortnite song parody, that’s the decision all artists make.