TikTok: An Epidemic
TikTok is an app that can be somewhat compared to Vine (rest in peace). It has gotten extremely popular over the past year, with roughly over 750 million downloads. For the youth, it is arguably one of today’s biggest wasters of time and destroyers of brain cells. Even a fair amount of college educated students spend time on the app. But if we know that TikTok doesn’t provide a positive payoff, why do we use it?
Like so many memes, songs, and trends that have gone viral, we can attribute the rise of TikTok to an information cascade. An information cascade, or herding, is defined as “following others choices regardless of your own private information”. In this case, the choice that others make is that of downloading the TikTok app and our private information would be our preconceived notions about the app before really immersing ourselves. As the app became increasingly popular, the conformity to join the TikTok craze grew stronger as the group of users grew larger, but what benefit comes from conforming? One could argue that the act of downloading (and using) TikTok has direct-benefit effects, as new content created could increase your enjoyment. Furthermore, TikTok boasts informational effects, as the actions of more and more people downloading it could change your opinion about downloading TikTok or about the app itself. The negative result of TikTok is that users don’t receive any useful information so it’s a mindless activity if you’re not a unique content creator. It’s also addicting, as its design allows users to scroll through video after video without end, and the majority of the content people see has been liked by millions of other users. Information cascades are everywhere and their effect is startling. The result of being sucked into an information cascade such as TikTok could result in a negative payoff, so it is imperative that we understand how information cascades can be based on very little real information.