How I Broke TikTok
Becoming a TikTok influencer was nowhere in my New Year's resolutions.
To give you an idea, three months ago I lumped TikTok in with Pokémon, Minecraft and manga: something young people do, probably great for them, but not for me.
Except now, I've become a (mini) TikTok star.
A short video I posted three days ago got ~~nearly~~ over 200,000 views; my follower count shot through the roof (UPDATE: 1,000!) and all my other videos are taking off. Things are picking up on Instagram too. Here's the video (YouTube version), and honestly, nothing about it said it would be a hit:
If you remember, I said in my previous post that I was going back to posting short videos (what YouTube calls "shorts" and Instagram "reels"), originally to share "philosophical notes" on YouTube. The philosophy went out the window and got replaced by questionable humor. For good measure, and to make the effort pay off, I made myself post on Instagram and TikTok as well. Of course, 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 great surprise, all the comments so far are... extremely funny. People who get my humor and play along. Except on Instagram, where... it's more complicated.
It started as a way to quickly give shape to the ideas I have every day and don't plan to do anything in particular with. Not everything is meant to become a "film" in the full sense, with a script, production, post-production... So I shoot in under twenty minutes, usually while I'm out walking, edit on my phone and bam, I post. There's also the wish to find an audience that shares my quirks, my sense of humor, and will be happy to come to screenings when I put out more ambitious films. Get around the gatekeepers.
So I'm going to keep posting videos. We'll see where it goes. For now, when I take a break, I'm enjoying trading little jokes with the people it made laugh, and I ignore the insults.
You can follow the videos I post on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube.
UPDATE: Several of my videos have gone viral by now, and I've noticed something worrying:
I get roughly three kinds of comments on my videos: 1) people who find it funny and play along, 2) people who don't get that it's a joke and are more or less insulting, and 3)... bots.
When a video passes a certain threshold (around 50k views), I see coordinated waves of extremely alarmist, negative messages posted by very suspicious accounts (no posts, no profile picture, or AI-generated videos). For example, when I joke that fog is "proof we're in a video game that hasn't finished rendering the scenery", I'm hit by an army of near-identical stories (same phrases, same words) that reply to each other and hint at conspiracies, always extremely dark, involving poisonings, diseases and fear of anything foreign.
In these comments, I feel like I'm reading the seeds of the stupid remarks I hear at some dinner parties from people who then say "do your research". But it's true that if you take them for real, these comments piling up leave a bitter taste in your mouth.