TikTok videos are absolutely grating to watch. Yes, you read that correctly. Now, I’ll happily explain my reasoning for dunking on this horrid platform while the dopamine-subsisting drones sharpen their pitchforks (you know who you are). It would be far too easy to critique TikTok’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party. After all, that is the most commonly discussed critique of the app. However, I’m not going to be able to bring anything new to that topic that better minds than mine haven’t already explored in depth. I could also hypothetically go after TikTok’s algorithm and how it’s designed to addict, though I’m not going to do that either. That point has also been hammered on too frequently and by those more knowledgeable and interested in that avenue than me. No, my critique of TikTok, (and YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and other short-form video content) drill straight to the core; their low production value.
Many TikTok videos are known to have an artificially-generated female narrator. This generic voice is devoid of any sort of tone changes or inflections. The lack of any real human narration detracts significantly from the quality of the video being played, as the narration does not mesh with the content at all. True voiceover work is difficult; one’s delivery needs to match the situation at hand; this feminine AI voice misses the mark entirely. As mentioned earlier, TikTok has deigned an algorithm that can relentlessly addict our brains and continually feed videos to users, it can surely produce a non-monotone narrator. It is not a matter of lack of skill, but a lack of will.
The font choices used in TikTok videos are also not creative at all. As discussed in my book, font choice matters a lot. Graphic designers carefully consider the fonts they use as differing font will have differing impacts on the viewer. For example, the character Sans from Undertale is a lackadaisical and jokey character, hence all of his text is written in the font Comic Sans. There is a lot of subtly that humans use to communicate with one another and hence there are endlessly differing types of fonts available in apps used to make longer-form content. However, TikTok has only five available fonts, thus rendering the app rather tone-deaf in the realm of nuance (I hope you were sitting down for that!).
Another element of the low production values evident in many comedic TikTok videos is the presence of only one actor. In a not-too-distant past, one-man shows were not very high on the hierarchy of entertainment options, yet our limbically-hijacked brains now can’t get enough of that limited format. Comedic videos often have one actor playing several different roles in a series of jarring jump-cuts in which the differing characters either have little defining features or blatant stereotypical differences (where’s the outrage?). Most actors appearing in TikTok videos have to juggle these multiple roles, and as a result, don’t create a suspension of disbelief for any of their characters. What’s worse is that this isn’t even necessary; normal length comedic YouTube videos frequently star more than one person, with each actor playing a separate role (you know, the Hollywood has been doing it for a century now). This isn’t a particularly high bar to cross either, yet TikTok videos still largely fall short.
The short time length of these comedic TikTok videos also sacrifice the story that they are trying to tell. When the maximum video length is three minutes (and let’s be honest, most of them are much shorter than that), often the creator needs to omit nuance and depth from the story. As a result, the punchlines for these jokes have very little set-up. While I’m not against being concise, some context is needed and this specific medium doesn’t fully allow for that. Good comedy is hard to make, and setting up a punchline is a skill. As a result, TikTok videos wind up being overly simplistic.
Many apps and websites that allow for crowdsource creation love to pitch their products as democratizing creativity. However, when you democratize you also amateur-ize. Democratization of anything leads to the field by taken over by non-experts; this isn’t a new idea either, Plato said this 2400 years ago. Admittedly, Hollywood and others who hold the keys to high production-value entertainment will sometimes screen out ideas that they are biased against. However, they are profit-driven and good ideas will usually win out. When we throw out gatekeeping, we throw out quality control as well, and that’s the point that nobody wants to truly talk about with this app. Odds are, you don’t have the special sauce when it comes to making videos.
Back in my day, TikTok was an annoyingly repetitive pop song, now it’s an annoyingly repetitive stream of low-budget trash…
Home Page 