In July 2021, the singer Gayle posted a video on her TikTok account, asking her followers for song ideas. The interaction soon turned into a fun exercise where she encouraged her followers to post comments that she could try to turn into an actual song. One follower suggested she write a song using the alphabet as lyrics. Gayle embraced this quirky idea and composed a song based on the alphabet, later posting a video of herself playing it on TikTok. That song became the wildly popular, Grammy- nominated ABCDEFU, which reached #1 on the Billboard Global 200.
This story neatly encapsulates the impact TikTok has had on the internet, media, and culture as a whole. Far from being just another social media platform that connects people with their friends, TikTok has become a cauldron of global content, delivered in the most personalised and psychologically persuasive way possible, so much so that it has become the blueprint for every other social media company to shamelessly imitate.
It has also sparked a creative boom, allowing vast numbers of people to create authentic, unpolished, yet highly entertaining videos while building lucrative audiences for themselves. With an estimated 1.04 billion people using the app daily worldwide, including 170 million in the U.S. alone, and an average American user spending 53 minutes on it per day, TikTok has amassed unprecedented attention in an era where attention drives the economy.
@gaylecantspell Reply to @nancy_berman definitely not based off personal experience… #orginalsong #newmusic #plslikethisaccount #hastagsworkapparently #acoustic ♬ abcdefu – GAYLE
Beginnings
It all began in 2018 when the Chinese company Byte Dance merged the popular lip-syncing app Musical.ly with Douyin, a local short-video app powered by an exceptionally effective recommendation algorithm. This merger gave birth to TikTok, combining a massive user base with a powerful algorithm designed to keep users highly engaged.
Paradigm Shift
For those who have witnessed the evolution of social media from the days of My Space and early Facebook, it is clear how revolutionary TikTok truly is in transforming the social media experience. Before TikTok, social media was genuinely social. Every platform was designed to recommend posts and content primarily from a user’s circle of friends and connections, an approach that seemed too fundamental to challenge. The social graph was at the core of Facebook’s algorithm. TikTok completely upended this model. Instead of assuming that users wanted to see content from their connections, it started from first principles, learning users’ actual preferences by displaying a series of videos, closely monitoring watch time and interactions, and continuously refining recommendations through machine learning.
This focus on users’ unconscious interactions with content organically led to what is often termed TikTok’s “dopamine- driven design.” The endless scroll, vertical video format, and short-duration clips are all engineered to encourage a dopamine-driven cycle of continuous engagement. This design has often been criticised as addictive, as the instant gratification effect is particularly pronounced among teens and young adults, who frequently spend hours browsing content on TikTok.
TikTok’s success has been so profound that technology commentators often refer to its impact as the “TikTokization of everything.” Social media platforms across the board have mostly abandoned content recommendations based on social connections, instead adopting TikTok- style “For You” sections. These sections mimic TikTok’s exact formula, that is, short-duration videos, endless scrolling, and engagement-driven content delivery. And yet, no other social media company has been able to replicate TikTok’s “secret sauce,” which is the algorithm that keeps both its user base and creator community loyal to the platform.
TikTok has also caused a fundamental shift in user behaviour, with many users now skipping Google and turning to TikTok for advice and recommendations on travel, music, movies, and restaurants. Entire industries, such as the music industry, now rely on TikTok as their primary marketing channel for generating revenue. TikTok Algorithm
Learnings
There is much to learn from TikTok’s success. For innovators and builders outside the Silicon Valley ecosystem, TikTok serves as proof that technology remains a meritocratic force in determining winners and losers. While concerns about TikTok’s addictiveness are valid and warrant further scrutiny, one cannot help but admire the simplicity of its approach and the scrappiness of its beginnings that ultimately led to its massive popularity.
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