TikTok is the Kardashian effect brought down to the masses of people, to roll around in. Mimic in just the right way and you too can be Kim for 15 minutes (if your house is big enough and or you're attractive enough, as you have to be able to sell it). TikTok's most popular non-celebrities are pitching exactly the same thing that made the Kardashians so popular, in the exact same way. It's a cultural wasteland, celebrated.
What the hell is anybody going to say in 10-15 seconds that is going to be valuable outside of a quick clip of music and some status pitching (show a big house, shake your ass, take off your shirt, dive into a pool, show seven seconds of a party)? Absolutely nothing. It's the same thing Instagram is mostly used for: status positioning, signaling. There is a reason why the evidence overwhelmingly points to all of this as being unhealthy - it's all built around intentionally amplifying an addictive, desperate aspect of human nature that is a big negative at its extremes (status seeking, narcissism, bullying, social competition, selling sex, all in a swirl together and pumped up).
Is TikTok a SSCly Scissor Service?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
People who expect a neural network to identify stuff like this have drunk WAAAAY too much ai kool-aid.
These videos are certainly pervasive - they are an attempt to trigger reactions to show that you like this content: for example, by getting you to watch through the end of the video, click on the creator's name for follow-up content, checking the comments for clues.
You can understand the videos as an attempt to game the algorithm, and I also think they are playing on themes which humans are genuinely addicted to and find it hard to fully control.
Long click will allow you to 'remove content from this creator' (excuse my translation): that will help.
My biggest gripe with it is that half of the content appears to be of the "build some tension up by hinting at a certain conclusion of the video, then simply ending the video before it comes to that conclusion and leave the viewer clueless" type, and TikToks famed algorithm seems to be entirely unable to discern that I hate this crap. Maybe it's because I watched some of these fully in the beginning until I understood the pattern. However, afterwards I swiped this kind of video away immediately once I notice the pattern, but the famed algorithm appears to be unable to re-learn that I really, really, really hate this kind of content.