By Kaycie Adams
Introducing TikTok, the app that is quickly gaining a reputation unlike any other.
Have you heard of TikTok? If not, it is quite possible you truly live under a rock.
If you have watched any video on Youtube in the past couple of months, the ads of random 15 second videos that interrupt every few minutes or so are TikToks. They are a unique kind of video, that lets you create your own audio, or lip-sync to someone else’s.
TikTok has 500 million global users and is rapidly gaining more. It originated from musical.ly, an app that had practically the same function.
Musical.ly shut down in August 2018, and was immediately bought by TikTok. Now, it brings in all types of people, both young and old, to create content and its own genre of meme culture.
People have a wide variety of opinions on TikTok. Many feel that it is annoying, lowbrow humor. One junior, Nicole Burns, believes that TikTok is “I think TikTok is trying to be the new Vine, but it is trying too hard. Vine was only 28 percent weirdo, and Tiktok is, like, 78 percent weirdo.”
However, there is a large amount of people disagree with this sentiment, and are embracing TikTok as the new Vine! Since January 17th, 2017, when Vine officially ended, there hasn’t been a video platform similar to the type of content created on Vine.
Vine created a specific type of humor, that TikTok’s are imitating, whether intentionally or unintentionally. TikTok meme accounts are popping up all over the internet, with Instagram being its main home of reaction content.
For seniors in high school today, the peak of Vine was during our 7th and 8th grade years. For underclassmen, this stretches all the way back to the 4th grade.
Today, TikTok holds this same value as Vine did for us. More and more young children are in reach of technology, and with TikTok gaining popularity rapidly, it makes sense why the app is gaining traction as the Vine of today’s youth.
Senior Daryan Ghaemi explains it excellently. “Vine is well known by many, and as our generation looks back at our childhood and see Vine, today’s youth will look back and see TikTok. It’s all relative to the person.”
It is also incredibly easy to gain fame on TikTok. The main way to watch content on TikTok is through the for you page that appears when you open the app.
Simply putting a few hashtags, including the hashtag #foryou, allows your content to gain fame and views. With fame being this easy, it is no doubt that a generation raised on Youtubers and daily vlogs, Kardashians and breaking the internet, and get rich quick schemes, it’s easy to think that instant fame brings young people to an app like TikTok.
One senior, Kevin Perry, hit it big on TikTok and is claiming his rise to fame. He joined TikTok, claiming, “I watched a video with my friend Ethan about getting TikTok famous in one day, and we decided to try.”
At the time of this publication, he has 27.1k fans, and 357.2k hearts and he is growing everyday. With a rapidly growing collection of fans, Kevin is quickly growing to be a large influencer on TikTok.
If Kevin agrees, you should too: TikTok is the new Vine.
