A few years ago, New York Times writer John Herrman wrote that the shift toward TikTok came after sites like Instagram started prioritising algorithmic recommendations over engagement with followers, describing it as hard to watch. “[TikTok] can be charming. It can be very, very funny. It is frequently, in the language widely applied outside the platform, from people on other platforms, extremely ‘cringe.'” In that cringey-ness, though, maybe some people began to suspect that TikTok might be more “real” than its predecessors had become.
