Hello friends.
Please join me on my journey to quantify to what extent Tiktok is a waste of time. Basically, my idea is that if I know the exact ratio of trash to worthwhile content, it will make me a more informed consumer of the internet. So if I find that 5% of the content I see on tiktok is worthwhile, and I spend, let’s say an hour on tiktok, then that means only 3 minutes of that entire hour were actually well-spent, and that the other 57 minutes were completely lost. Also, at least for the duration of this experiment, I’ll be engaging with the content critically, which I always think is a good idea.
So my methodology was originally going to just be looking at tiktok for 20 minutes and then for each video I would categorize it as worthwhile or not, and then some extra information like the category of the video, maybe the length, things like that. Whether I enjoyed it or it caused some emotional valence, things like that. However I also realised that the order of things probably also matters. So the algorithm is going to show you the “best of tiktok” that you haven’t seen yet, and then it’s going to go down the list of now less and less “positively reviewed”/ “most engaged with” content. So that means that actually I’m going to get a higher percentage if I open it now (after not having been on it for a few days) than I would if I watched for an hour and then took my sample. At least, that’s how I think the algorithm works.
However, the first 20 minutes is mostly what I watch and then I have the timer that kicks me out (usually).So maybe it’s actually most useful to me to examine how I would use it, not necessarily trying to get a baseline of tiktok’s overall ‘worthwhileness’. It also has this steelmanning effect where I’m gonna be getting the maximum ‘worthwhileness’ possible, and the percentage can only get lower.
Originally I was just going to rate each tiktok, but now that I think about it, there’s lots of tiktoks that I would usually skip entirely, specifically because I think they’re not worthwhile. So instead of doing that, I think I’ll actually just do a screen-record of my 20 minutes on tiktok, and then analyse the screen recording afterwards. This is probably the most ecologically-valid method, and also has the added bonus of letting me see what I skipped, why I skipped it and how far into the video I got before I skipped it. So I’ll set a timer for 20 minutes (because I can’t bear to spend more time on there) and then I’ll analyse the video.
I screen recorded 20 minutes of tiktok and used it as I would normally. Then I reviewed the video and noted: the content (a summary of what the video was about), whether I scrolled away before it ended (looped) or not, the genre (more like subgenre, or xx-tok; I feel like it made intuitive sense to me based on my interests and scrolling patterns), whether I liked, saved, opened the comments, whether the comments were worthwhile, my rating of the video out of 5, whether the video was worthwhile, whether I used 2x speed and how long I spent watching the video.
For the full table with the data, click here.
Originally I was just going to create a percentage based on the number of videos I thought were worthwhile, but that does not equate to time wasted, because I think ads are a waste of time, but I was only viewing them for about 1-2 seconds (sometimes less), so that would really skew the numbers. But here’s the statistic: of the 27 videos I watched in 20 minutes, 12 were considered worthwhile. That’s 44.44%. If you don’t include ads, it’s 63.16%.
What surprised me most was the number of advertisements. It was way more frequent than I realised. Of the 27 videos, 8 were ads (29.63%).
I scrolled away before the video ended only on ads. Every other video I watched all the way through. I liked 6 videos (22.22%) and saved 2 (7.41%). I opened the comments on every video that was not an advertisement (except for one video that had no comments and the last one which got cut short). I almost always opened the comments one time, but on longer videos I opened them more than once. Twice on a 5:41 minute video, four times on a 4:29 video. Of the videos on which I opened the comments (17 videos), I considered reading the comments to have been worthwhile 4 times (23.53% of the time). The mean rating for a video (including advertisements which I rated 0), was 1.89/5. Not including ads, the average rating for a video was 2.68/5. I used 2x speed 3 times, twice on long videos I considered worthwhile, once on a short video (45 sec) I did not consider worthwhile. The average watch time of a video was 43.89 seconds; if not including ads that were immediately skipped, the average was 62.0 seconds.
Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Of the 19:45 minutes I spent on tiktok… 16:29 were considered worthwhile. 83.46%! If I go back and consider which videos added value to my life, I still get 75%. In other words, 14.54% of the time spent on tiktok is absolutely worthless, and 25% of the time, there is no value added to my life.
Well, that was absolutely not what I was expecting whatsoever. I really expected tiktok to be a much greater black hole of my time, and I really expected it to have very minimal value to me (I mean the 5% I started with in the introduction was an exaggeration, but I still thought it would be around 15%). This is really interesting to me because that means tiktok is actually worth looking at 83% of the time. (Of course, you cannot look at it for only that 83%. It’s a gamble, which is the purpose of the design).
The ability to immediately skip an ad as soon as you recognize that it is one is excellent. While I know that ads mostly work on a familiarity basis and more subliminal ways, I still think this is a huge win. In my 20 minutes on tiktok, I spent about 7 seconds looking at ads (it’s more because sub-one second was counted as 0 seconds. Still.). Although if you compare it to youtube with an ad blocker… It’s a fair consideration. Especially if you’re like me and have sponsorblock (what a blessing).
I think another thing that’s interesting is how involved the comments were in my enjoyment of something. Okay, sure, the comments were usually not worthwhile. But I opened them every single time. (I can see the argument for this being another lottery thing where you don’t know what the comments will say.) But this is a big component I hadn’t even thought about before. The community aspect. I didn’t even think there was a community aspect in tiktok. I really just thought it was scrolling through videos. But seeing what other people had to say about the video was honestly half the fun. Thinking about it now, that’s also the case with youtube videos. I’m often reading the comments while the video is playing (kinda in a subway surfer-esque way), and sometimes the comments really add to the video. Videos with no comments, or where they are blocked (certain music audio on youtube, new or less viewed videos, children’s videos on youtube) feel really boring and empty compared to lively comment sections. And that’s probably why there’s so much rage bait and engagement bait and stuff like that where they always want you to “leave your opinion down in the comments”. It helps the algorithm, sure, but it also makes for more engaging content. The meta-commentary on the video is just as important as the video itself. I feel like this says something about other forms of media too. Twitter often being commentary on other people’s tweets, or a piece of media. So many videos are responses to something. Actually, (and this is probably just my feed but I think it applies to a lot of videos) most videos are a response to something. World news and events. Philosophy topics, books, movies, internet scandals, etc. Not that many videos are completely new and unique creations (like an animation, storytime, process behind the creation of an artwork like a speedpaint, etc.). Youtube is most often commentary and reactionary. And we really enjoy that.
Building on that, I think this might be a desire for community and shared ideas. Do we like this piece of media or not? What do we think about this? It’s also a way to stay up to date on important topics like Are we in a recession? What should we do about it? In this loneliness epidemic, people crave community. We crave reactions. We crave comment sections. But that’s just a thought. A topic to explore another time.
Something else to consider is the mean rating for the videos. Not including ads, it was 2.68/5. Personally, I think that’s quite low. That means that while I enjoyed the content a lot of the time, and I think it benefitted me in some way, the actual quality of the video is considerably low. This also suggests that I should be looking to spend my time elsewhere, on things that I would rate more highly (such as a book, a hobby, etc.). That being said, I am a firm believer in that meaning and value can be extracted from things that are not very good (movies you rate poorly, books you dislike, etc.) as well as from low-brow or low-quality media or art (the great characters and storylines of Nu:Carnival, for example). So I don’t think we should put the most stock in the rating metric, personally. I think the evaluation of the work as being worthwhile or adding value to my life should definitely be considered alongside (or slightly above) the rating at least.
Another thing I want to point out is that not a single video felt like “brainrot” to me. A few videos felt a little pointless, or like I was not the audience, but no video felt like brainrot to me. I don’t deny that occasionally brainrot will appear on my timeline, but I think that since I don’t engage with it typically, nothing on my timeline actively made me feel like it was detrimental to my brain’s development. Also, if I did come across it, I think I would probably scroll. But I’ve now been on this platform for a couple of years, and it's certainly suited to my tastes. I think the data stands in stark contrast to what the typical rhetoric around tiktok is (brainrot, waste of time, black hole, useless). In fact, I would say it’s actually quite a lot better than what we used to do, which was watch TV all the time. Constant reruns, eternal ad breaks, content made by very few people in charge, presenting a single narrative. I think the echo chambers we tend to inhabit also present only a single narrative, but that’s a larger topic that doesn’t fit here. What I’m trying to say is that tiktok is just as bad (or good), if not slightly better, than watching TV, and that these two activities (watching tiktok and watching TV) are evaluated and discussed in very different manners, at least in the present day. Just to reemphasize, I don’t think we should watch more tiktok. Only that we should look at how we use tiktok and why we use it instead of demonizing it and shaming ourselves for interacting with it.
I started this mission with the intention of finding out to what extent tiktok is a waste of my time. I thought the answer would be ‘it’s mostly a waste of time’, but the results were quite the opposite, with 83.46% of my twenty minutes being spent on videos I considered to be worthwhile, and 75% of my time spent on videos that I considered to enrich my life in some way. Of course, as I mentioned in the beginning, this percentage is likely to decrease with more total watch time. But it’s representative of my current tiktok use. That being said, I value a lot of activities above the passive tiktok viewing experience, so I’m definitely not suggesting increasing time spent on tiktok. Just that there actually shouldn’t be any shame in using the application. Finally, we discovered the importance of community engagement and public opinion on the way I use tiktok in general, with comment sections being important parts of the video watching experience.
