Have you been scrolling through TikTok only to find that your For You page is now full of videos with 0 likes, 0 comments and 0 interactions? Have you been seeing a lot of content lately that’s incredibly bizarre and in some cases the total opposite of what you’d usually enjoy watching? Well, you’re not alone. It’s happening to almost everyone.
Recently, I was scrolling through TikTok and noticed that something was a little bit off on my For You page.
Blurry videos of random people screeching songs to their camera with 6 likes, people making fat jokes like some kind of twisted YouTube video from 2006 and a whole smorgasbord of other weird shit.
Keep in mind my TikTok feed is usually memes about being gay and living in Australia. Long gone were the viral videos from people like Millie Ford… I was in what can only be described as hell.
Here is the post that made me realise that something was actually wrong with TikTok and that it wasn’t just me being crazy:
TikTok what the fuck?? Why on Earth would I want to see this? I damn near dropped my phone into my hot chocolate when I saw this pop up out of nowhere.
I put a call out on rival video-focused app Instagram to see if everyone else was in TikTok purgatory like I was. Thankfully, I found out I wasn’t alone.
“I have noticed this!! I get so many with 0 interactions and I feel like I’m being thrown scrap videos to watch, we deserve better,” said one of my friends.
“Sometimes I get random vids with hardly any engagement at all! They’re also the strangest videos,” said another.
“It’s been happening for weeks now. It went from ‘here, have some trending vids’ to ‘no one has ever seen this video before,’” said a third.
I felt like one of the Stranger Things kids in the Upside Down, and all of my friends were my gang ready to fight Vecna. Except in this instance, the Upside Down is TikTok hell and Vecna is also TikTok.
@ellyvickere
PEDESTRIAN.TV reached out to TikTok for comment but they declined.
In their most recent update announcement on July 13, however, it sounds like the company didn’t exactly intend for us to be witnessing random kids in V for Vendetta masks.
“Our aim is for each person’s For You feed to feature a breadth of content, creators, and topics they’ll love,” Head of Trust and Safety Cormac Keenan wrote.
“As we continue to build and improve these systems, we’re excited about the opportunity to contribute to long-running industry-wide challenges in terms of building for a variety of audiences and with recommender systems.
“We also acknowledge that what we’re striving to achieve is complex and we may make some mistakes. Our focus remains to create the safest and most enjoyable experience for our community and we will continue to listen to feedback from our community and continue consulting with independent experts, including our Content Advisory Council.”
Ok so sounds to me like what we’re all witnessing at the moment is one of these so-called “mistakes”.
Technology is a fkn wild thing, so hopefully the folks at TikTok can remedy this soon. I’m starting to avoid using the app because of some of the content I’m being forced to swipe through on my For Yoy page. I can only click “not interested” so many times.
