Starts with dance videos, Figures our your preferences pretty quickly and I have found it very educational, the short format really cuts to the chase, It has prompted me to learn new techniques in cooking, woodwork, stretching... positive overall!

If you're after than kind of content, you may like https://watchnebula.com/ - pretty much curated educational YouTube. Tiny cost and no ads.

I agree, it seems benign besides the surveillance.

Could you expand on this? Does the app have more surveillance/data gathering than other? Genuinely curious, feeling naive

It does not. Spreading conspiracy is exciting and makes people feel smart. If you use Frida to bypass cert pinning and see what’s sent, TikTok doesn’t collect anything of note in the realm of social media.

Google (and the NSA by extension, via PRISM) has magnitudes more information on you.

Please elaborate. What's wrong with a few dancing videos? Honest question.

I want to think they’re referring more to the culture of doing things you wouldn’t normally do in order to gain popularity. Like that one girl who drank a ton of Benadryl.

The problem is that those people exist on every social media platform, not just TikTok.

And attention seeking clowns used to around before the Internet. I used to be one.

It’s comments and the duets.

Little kids on TikTok are much more vicious than Twitter users. And they are little kids. Tiktok does a decent job with facial recognition to suppress their videos but that doesn’t stop a mass horde of them from stumbling on a couple of videos of mine and turning it into a cesspool.

Now of course that’s not worth the eradication of the app, but it’s not very inspiring to see the next generation being encouraged to act in the worst ways of online discourse.

As someone that grew up playing with other kids on the net, kids have always been vicious unempathetic little shits.