Suppy Sup: Don't Send Me TikToks!

Don’t send me TikToks.

Look, it’s not you. It’s me. And also TikTok.

I have friends who will read this and think it’s about them. In a general sense, they’re right. But this is more about my relationship to TikTok and social media than it is about any one person who sends me stuff to watch. So let me take a second go at my messaging.

Send me all the TikToks you want. Send me hundreds! But let’s all agree that I don’t need to react or respond to them, okay?

It’s an energy thing. It’s a personal thing. It’s an “I’d just rather not” thing.

How It Started

I first joined TikTok during the lockdown-addled era of early Covid. I experienced mild virality, in that I had one video reach 300k+ views and another exceed 600k. The rush was impactful and fleeting. I felt great until suddenly I didn’t. So I filmed more dumbass videos in search of a redux.

My real TikTok rabbit hole moment, however, was the shared account I started with my sister. BookRush: siblings talkin’ about books!

In the beginning of our journey, I was actually, legitimately proud of BookRush. We wore bucket hats and made videos we wanted to make, sharing our bookish tastes with the “BookTok” community.

Then my sister left for a summer in Alaska, specifically a portion of the state where shitWi-Fi and limited daylight and long research hours made it tough for her to film constantly. I picked up the slack, recording constantly. I posted three videos per day every day for a few months.

I convinced myself it was a passion project. In reality, it was just work. An amalgamation of half-baked ideas I forced myself to execute in the name of pleasing the algorithm.

The problems I encountered during this time were plentiful! Burnout chief among them, of course. But I also started to see cracks in the glistening sheen of the community in which I was participating.

For a community ostensibly about books and reading—namely, loving those two things—BookTok didn’t bother to look inward.

Half of the videos were about Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns And Roses in a ploy for views (I even made a few joke vids about the series just to nab some eyeballs). I saw book haul after book haul, focusing on buying books rather than reading them. There’s a Japanese word for this:

Perhaps the worst of it was the echo chamber. The same books popped up over and over again. Different creators would spout the same talking points ad nauseam.

My brilliant Crocodile Hunter parody, The Bookadile Hunter, flopped, in what is quite possibly the biggest snub in history. To be fair, that video was one of the few I had fun making, so I didn’t care much about its numbers.

BookTok, like so many niche social media communities, was full of clout-chasing and influencer hopefuls, myself included

This wasn’t everyone, though And many folks made cool, interesting content. But we were all subject to the machine, pushing out content because it’s what the algorithm wanted, desperately hoping to please the invisible powers behind the curtain.

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but I will anyway. TikTok profits off the free work of creators, BookTokers or otherwise. It creates an environment in which you’re expected to burn yourself out in search of viral success again and again. Mia Cole outlines this and much much more in her recent video essay “The Terrifying Reality of TikTok.”

I felt all of this while I was within it, but I couldn’t quite put it into words.

When my sister returned from Alaska, she did not return to making TikToks. Soon after, I abandoned the account as well. We briefly teased a return, though it was short-lived.

A month later, we agreed to delete our account. I then followed suit and abolished my personal profile.

How It’s Going

I’m “that guy.” I frequently announce that I have no TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram. I caveat such utterances with the fact that I have Twitter, though it’s only on my desktop, and LinkedIn, the biggest cestpool of corporate fuckery I have ever seen. Both help me promote my work, and TBH, Twitter is fun (in moderation, and Musk is doing his damned best to kill the platform).

I’ve taken steps to limit my social media use. Yeah, I watched The Social Dilemma and it hit me hard. I’m not here to proselytize pulling the social plug because I haven’t even done that. Not fully, anyway.

Trust me, though, when I say I don’t want to touch TikTok with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. In the space between the end of BookRush and the end of my personal account, I found myself locked in the ongoing scroll cycle for minutes, sometimes hours at a time.

When I had Instagram, same old story (literally). It’d tap through everyone’s story, even the folks I hadn’t talked to since high school.

Let me reiterate once again that I don’t give a shit what you do. If you like social media and want to keep it for whatever reason, do it. That’s your prerogative. My prerogative is a fantastic song by Bobby Brown. And also to not use social media beyond the clearly defined boundaries I’ve drawn between the algorithms and me.

So what happens now, as a cord-cutter, when I receive a TikTok from someone?

It’s somewhere between this:

And this:

I love you, people who send me TikToks! I appreciate the thought, the effort (two button presses) it takes you to send a non-app-haver this 10 to 180-second video. But when I open your message to find a link to a TikTok, I feel like complete ass. Rather than try to stop you, I will instead make my singular 2023 resolution: watch zero TikToks.

They remind me of the succubus platform and what it does to creators. They contain content readily found elsewhere. They open new browser windows in my phone.

Should you send me a deeply serious TikTok and receive a “hahaha classic” in response, I apologize in advance. Remember: it’s not you, it’s me.

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That’s all for this week, folks! Catch you next time.