In my New Year's resolutions, becoming a TikTok influencer was nowhere on the list.
To tell you the truth, three months ago, I put TikTok in the same category as Pokémon, Minecraft, and manga: things young people do that are probably great for them but not for me.
But now, I’ve become a (mini) TikTok star.
A short video I posted three days ago has reached nearly more than 200,000 views; my follower count has skyrocketed, and all my other videos are gaining traction. Things are also picking up on Instagram. Here’s the video in question (YouTube version), which, honestly, had no reason to succeed:
If you recall, I mentioned in the previous post that I had started posting short videos again (what YouTube calls "shorts" and Instagram calls "reels"), originally to share "philosophical musings" on YouTube. The philosophy fell by the wayside, replaced by questionable humor. To make the effort worthwhile, I forced myself to post on Instagram and TikTok as well. Naturally, that’s where it went viral.
It’s another world. If I put my phone down for five minutes, I always come back to 99+ notifications: likes, comments, shares, new followers. It never stops, not even at night. And to my surprise, all the comments so far have been... incredibly funny. People get my humor and play along. Except on Instagram, where... things are a bit more complicated.
Initially, it was about quickly giving shape to ideas I have every day, ones I don’t plan to do anything major with. Not everything is meant to become a proper "Film." So I shoot in under twenty minutes—usually while out on a walk—edit on my phone, and bam, I publish. There’s also a desire to find an audience that shares my quirks, my sense of humor, and who will happily come to screenings when I release more ambitious films. Bypass the gatekeepers.
So I’m continuing to post videos. We’ll see where it leads. For now, I’m happy to exchange little jokes with the people who found them funny while I take a break.
You can follow the videos I post on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.
UPDATE: I now have several videos that have gone viral, and I’ve become aware of a troubling phenomenon.
I roughly get three types of comments on my videos: 1) People who find them funny and build on the jokes, 2) those who don’t understand it’s humor and are more or less insulting, and 3)... bots.
I can’t explain it any other way. When a video reaches a certain threshold (about 50k views), I see coordinated attacks of extremely alarmist and negative messages posted by highly suspicious accounts (no posts, no profile picture, or AI-generated videos). For example, when I joke about fog being "proof we’re in a video game that hasn’t finished rendering the background," I’m faced with an army of eerily similar anecdotes (same expressions, same wording), responding to one another, and leading to extremely dark conspiracy theories involving poisonings, illnesses, and fear of anything foreign.
I feel like I’m reading the seeds of the silly remarks I hear at certain dinners from people who say, "Do your research." But it’s true that, en masse, these comments color everything and can leave a bitter taste.