Instagram and YouTube etc. have all become incredibly corporate with professional production studios etc. dominating the platforms - I imagine the same might happen to TikTok eventually, but at the moment you can just see a funny video someone made of their cat, and the cat isn't sponsored by SquareSpace.
Also teens and young people in general say that their parents and grandparents moved to Facebook because of which they do not feel comfortable doing all the shenanigans on the Facebook anymore.
Zuckerberg was genius and cursed at the same time because he created social network for everything or in another words for general content(text, photos, videos etc.) but he didn't specialize in any until recently when he and his team started paying attention to each and every of this content category.
The reason they don't have all those filtering options is probably because most people don't want to use them and it's fun to see video content from all around the world and even in different languages. Serendipity on TikTok is part of the appeal.
Although it wasn't the case for you, I'd say TikTok probably has the best cold-start experience of any consumer content app. For comparison, try creating a new account on YouTube or IG.
Still get that TikTok may not be for everyone, but imo it feels like the end game design of short video content consumption. The content can be really fun, silly, pointless, mundane, or educational. You don't need to follow people. Celebs are not as relevant. Don't like something? Just swipe up. It's a pretty refreshing take.
Actually, it starts you off with your native language only at first IIRC. I increased it to seven different ones which didn't matter at all and then decreased it to three. And again, no difference.
I don't use any social media and all the "celebrity" stuff is generally not for me at all. So I can't really compare the experience to anything.
Though, I guess I can attribute the success to what the others said, despite its demerits:
- really low barrier of entry (mrkramer)
- organic feeling, as opposed to corporate-controlled/generated (alexgmcm)
The addictive nature of seeing what comes next likely also plays a role.
Anyway, just some ranting because I don't think I can understand why this is so popular, despite being so unusable. Granted, at best I would use it as an appetizer for proper content (like after listening to a good tune, looking for the full song or hearing/seeing some interesting tidbit and looking for more information). If people that talk aren't involved, it also rather reminds me of flash loops from days (more or less) gone by, just with terrible captions as an addition.