On TikTok, Algorithms, and My Beef with JJ Redick
It was probably around February of 2020. TikTok was popular with teens, but hadn’t quite exploded yet. My young friends, Julie (18 at the time) and Maddie (19 at the time), were using it and loving it. I didn’t trust it. I never trust new social media networks… or old ones. I don’t like companies having my information. They’re gonna sell it and then I’m gonna get robocalls from some scammer trying to get me to give my social security number up in exchange for Herbal Boner Pills (HBPs). Is that what you want? You want someone buying beautiful purses and exotic furs under your name because they stole your identity, leaving you penniless and not even having the decency to give you free shipping on the HBPs? All to see some teens half-heartedly mimic lazy choreography and, on occasion, pretend to be wolves (this was a real thing. This was a trend that happened!)? Foolish.
“Foolish!” I bellowed, re: TikTok, to Maddie.
“Not foolish,” she replied. “You’d like it! You’d actually probably go viral.”
Now, that piqued my interest. You see, I love attention. It’s a sickness deep inside of me. I can’t explain it. I was a child who was praised adequately, critiqued when necessary, and loved unconditionally. This thirst for eyeballs on me is a mystery that multiple therapists couldn’t even begin to diagnose, but it is a thirst that must be quenched. Ew.
Still, though, I wasn’t fully on board. I didn’t feel like TikTok would be a proper vehicle for what I was doing comedically. I don’t really know what I meant by that and most of my friends actually told me the opposite- that it was perfect for what I was doing. It just seemed stupid to me! Okay? It was an app for children, like Snapchat. (If you are over 22 years old and you are on Snapchat, I beseech you: reconsider!) I didn’t care about the Internet. That’s not the type of success I wanted. I felt like once you were a TikTok star, it would be near impossible to shed that label and jump to television. That had been the case with many of the YouTubers I saw as I was growing up. They had ambitions to go beyond the platform. Those ambitions mostly resulted in failure. So, I was content to stick my nose up.
A month later, I walked into my 10am Creative Nonfiction class, earbuds in. It was about 10:05, so I was a couple minutes earlier than usual. I was probably listening to “Bags” by Clairo or “Cash Shit” by Megan Thee Stallion. I looked around the room and the vibe was pretty heinous. I took my earbuds out.
My friend Natalie’s last name starts with an “A.” Mine starts with an “O.” So, she gets university-wide emails 5-10 minutes before I do. She asked if I’d seen it yet.
“Seen what?”
We were being told that, when we left for Spring Break at the end of the week, that we were not to return to campus. COVID was here. We were going to have to stay home for at least an extra two weeks. That was my last real week of college.
I had an apartment off-campus. My lease wasn’t up until June, so my girlfriend, Wonderful Sammy, and I elected to isolate there until the school year ended or until we were back to school in person. Both of us were finishing up our theses. I was making a movie and we had wrapped filming two days before the COVID announcement went out.
The school year ended. I finished editing the movie. We moved out. I graduated from college in my living room in Kennebunk, Maine. First in my family to have the full traditional college experience up until that point. I was pretty bummed out, but it was time to look to the future. I began to apply to jobs. I couldn’t get any jobs. Companies weren’t hiring. Everyone was laying off their staff. The formerly-employed were taking lower level positions and entry level media jobs were few and far between.
I will say this, though, I applied to a certain new podcast company that was created by someone who went on to become the head coach of a certain team that has a certain LeBron James on the team. I was plenty qualified for the job. Didn’t even get a response, but I might’ve dodged a bullet. It’s been reported that the guy says the n-word and I don’t want to be known as the dude who punched JJ Redick.
I ended up getting a summer internship with an alum of my college. It was nice, but it was only for three months. The summer ended. I had nothing.
My same-age friends Maddy (not to be confused with Maddie) and Emily were on TikTok, they told me. In a fugue state, I had put out some fairly unhinged videos on YouTube, including two episodes of a late night talk show hosted by Sammy’s dog, Moggin. They said that I could put those videos on TikTok and they’d probably be seen by more people. They told me that if I started posting, that I’d probably go viral. So, now FOUR people have told me I’ll go viral. I’m stuck going back and forth between my mom’s house and Sammy’s parent’s house. I have no job prospects. I’m losing my mind. “Fine,” I say. “I’ll join TikTok.”
October 2020. I started posting. At first my videos got a few hundred views. I felt like a huge dork, because I hate to seem like I am trying. Here’s the thing: I’ve been trying my whole life! I try very hard all the time, which is so uncool and I am absolutely trying to be cool! Cool people are cool! Now, everyone in the world has the potential to see me trying to be funny.
When I started doing stand-up, I realized that it’s an incredible mental challenge. If you bomb on stage, you aren’t bombing as a character. You aren’t bombing while reading someone else’s words. You are bombing as you. The audience doesn’t like it? Their issue is with your brain. I don’t want people to hate my brain! I want people to love my brain and give it awards, prizes, and beautiful (ethical) gems from far-flung locations.
My boredom was greater than my trepidation. I decided if I was gonna do this, I was gonna do it. I read that posting 2-3 videos a day would increase your chances of going viral. As I read that, I thought about what that does to the quality of what you’re putting out, but I heeded the advice. I shot 2-3 videos per day and edited and transcribed them in Adobe Premiere. In about two weeks, I had done it. It was a stupid Halloween-themed video, but it reached over 750,000 views within a day. I got a comment telling me that their principal played it at their school’s Halloween assembly. Which confused me, because what is a Halloween assembly? And if you show a TikTok to a group of 1,000 people, you’ve just lost me 1,000 views, ya jerk!
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I was being flooded with likes and comments. I refreshed and refreshed. It was like doing a beautiful drug, but legal, but equally detrimental to the brain. I was energized, invigorated, sweaty, and ready to make more. I went from 200 followers to over 10,000 that day. The timing of my joining TikTok was fortuitous- everyone was stuck at home. SO many people were on TikTok for hours and hours. It was a prison of their own making and I was the warden. Or the guard? No. The entertainment that they bring in and it’s like, “Okay, this is just the only thing there is to do.” I’m not sure. I’ve never been to prison. I’ve been IN a prison but it was for a field trip. I don’t know too much about the day-to-day of prison. This was a bad analogy. The criminal justice system is criminal. For-profit prisons!? That’s crazy.
“Oh what do you do for work?”
“I chain my fellow man. Business is booming.”
Terrible.
Okay, so… TikTok.
I was doing well. My videos were decent. I was getting likes, views, follows, comments, all that good stuff. And I was reading the comments, which is deranged behavior. Don’t read comments. You’ll go crazy. I wasn’t even getting negative comments, really. I was just kinda getting versions of the same few comments. Everybody thought they were being funny and original, riffing off my video. It made me irrationally angry. Everybody wanted to weigh in, but nobody had anything to say.
There was a hollow feeling to putting work out just to get the validation of eyeballs and algorithms. There was also an electric feeling to it. People were SEEING me and hearing my jokes. And they liked them!
Reading up on how to game TikTok in your favor (again, I had no job), I saw a lot of advice to find your niche. My niche was just that I’m… me. So, my videos were about a range of topics. I had a certain format of video that did really well and I used that format again and again, but even as the views stayed at a decent level, I got bored. I wanted to do real comedy. I was hoping I’d be able to use this as a springboard once venues started opening again.
I moved to LA in November 2020. By January, my views were dropping. I hadn’t replicated the success of that first hit and I was seeing other comedians take off. People who made videos similar to mine were blowing up and getting podcasts and doing live shows as the Algorithm seemed to decide that I was no longer interesting to it.
In January 2021, I began working for a company that made branded content with influencers. This company also made me want to walk into traffic. I was pitching braindead ideas for braindead “creators” to help them sell jeans to children. It was awful stuff. Really bleak. I had to be online all the time so that I was “up to date with all the trending audios.” I will be writing about this in depth later and now that I’ve reminded myself of it, I will be discussing it with my therapist tomorrow.
As awful as the job was… Wait. Legally I think they called it an internship so they could pay me $500/month to work FULL TIME! As awful as the INTERNSHIP was, it put a lot of things in perspective to me. Platforms driven by algorithms are beasts that must be fed constantly and they are picky eaters. They want the same thing over and over and over. The Algorithm is a machine and it wants us to be machines as well. This is death for art. That’s why people like Mr. Beast can put out a video and get 40 million views in 24 hours. He’s able to behave like a machine, because he’s not fulfilled by his product, he’s fulfilled by his profit. Influencers who make “content” aren’t making art, they’re making commercials, which is fine if you like commercials! Some people like commercials. When I was a tween, I loved this commercial for Jackson Hewitt. When I heard it from a different room, I’d run to the TV.
Algorithms are programmed to keep you watching. Commercials are made for the same reason. What’s also made to keep you glued to the screen? Rage bait: Fight videos, “Karens” yelling at Puerto Rican children, the “anti-woke” bullshit. The content made with the sole intent of keeping the audience’s eyeballs is either trying to rile you up, sell you something, or both. Algorithms reward hacks and grifters. They also hate Black people because of the sheer number of racists they take their data from.
I remember seeing data that showed the types of videos that are more commonly viewed on TikTok. I’m not going to cite that data because it is from 2021, I forget where I saw it, and this isn’t a science paper. Comedy was far down the list. People don’t want to think on these apps. They want to watch a dude clean grout, they want to see a woman put on makeup, they want to see that woman get yelled at for putting on a foundation that’s three shades too dark and calling Black people “Colored.” I am not immune to this! I love watching people yell at people and sell me things. I have seen every episode of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. But a steady diet of anger and advertisement does not make for a stable mind, body, or spirit. It’s soulless viewing and soulless creation.
Even still, the promise of virality leading to career success and financial fortune is so incredibly enticing, and speaking practically, comedians kind of need to be on social media nowadays. So, despite everything I’ve said, you can find me posting on TikTok from time to time. I guess what I’m trying to say is, to my dear friends- You were right: I did go viral. But you were wrong: I did not love it.
Oof. This one got less funny. I was hoping that this would all be funny, but reading it back… I don’t know. Do me a favor, when you look back at your time reading this, imagine that you were laughing two times as much as you actually were. Thank you.
ALSO! I had to look up my TikTok to link it to this and I found out that four years ago, it ended up on Reddit. That’s never great! The comments were similar to those on TikTok, but this one from gulpdingus really stood out.
