English
American Idle February 21, 2021 by Eugene Wei
I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity. And this is that, in part. But it discusses a bunch of other topics, some only tangentially related to TikTok.
All the points I wanted to cover seem hyperlinked in a sprawling loose tangle. This could easily have been several standalone posts. I've been stuck on how to structure it.
Some people find my posts too long. I'm sympathetic to the modern plague of shortened attention spans, but I also don't want lazy readers. At the same time, this piece felt like it was missing a through line that would help pull a reader through.
And then I had a minor epiphany, or perhaps it was a moment of delusion. Either way, it provided an organizing conceit: I decided to write this piece in the style of the TikTok FYP feed. That is, a series of short bits, laid out vertically in a long scrolling feed.
This piece is long, but if you get bored in any one section, you can just scroll on to the next one; they're separated by horizontal rules for easy visual scanning. You can also read them out of order.
There are lots of cross-references, though, so if you skip some of the segments, others may not make complete sense. However, it's ultimately not a big deal.
By network effects of creativity, I mean that every additional user on TikTok makes every other user more creative. This exists in a weak form on every social network and on the internet at large. The connected age means we are exposed to so much from so many more people than at any point in human history. That can't help but compound creativity.
TikTok has a strong form of this type of network effect. They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content. In their app, they have a wealth of features that make it dead simple to grab any element from another TikTok and incorporate it into a new TikTok.
TikTok's Warp Scan filter is a bizarre concept for a filter in and of itself, but the myriad of ways TikTok users put it to use just shows what happens when you throw random tools to the masses and allow for emergent creativity. It only takes a handful of innovators to unleash a meme tsunami.
The Duet feature belongs in the social media hall of fame of primitives alongside features like Follow and the Like button. What feature better epitomizes the remix, react culture of the internet?
TikTok enables, for video and audio, the type of combinatorial evolution that Brian Arthur describes as the underlying mechanism of the tech industry's innovation. How many truly original ideas are there in Silicon Valley? Very few. Most have been tried umpteenth times in the past.
This is why rejecting companies that are trying something that's been tried before is so dangerous. It's lazy pattern-matching.
The toughest job for any creative is the cold start. The blinking cursor on the blank page in a new document. Now imagine trying to make a TikTok from scratch if you're older than, say, 19. The creative bar is high, you don't know how to dance, you're not up on the latest memes or popular music.
But the beauty of TikTok's FYP algorithm and the Discover page is that you don't have to create a TikTok from scratch.
中文
美国闲置 2021年2月21日 作者：尤金·魏
我承诺写一篇关于TikTok的最终文章，主要关注创造力的网络效应。这篇文章部分做到了这一点。但它还讨论了许多其他话题，有些与TikTok只有间接关系。
所有我想涵盖的点似乎都以一个 sprawling loose tangle 的形式超链接在一起。这很容易成为几篇独立的帖子。我一直卡在如何结构化它。
有些人觉得我的帖子太长。我理解现代注意力持续时间缩短的困扰，但我也不想迎合懒惰的读者。与此同时，这篇文章感觉缺少一条主线来帮助读者阅读。
然后我有了一个小小的顿悟，或者也许是一瞬间的妄想。不管怎样，它提供了一个组织概念：我决定以TikTok FYP（为你推荐）源的形式写这篇文章。也就是说，一系列简短的片段，垂直布局在一个长长的滚动源中。
这篇文章很长，但如果你对任何一个部分感到无聊，你可以直接滚动到下一个部分；它们用水平线分隔，便于视觉扫描。你也可以乱序阅读。
不过，有很多交叉引用，所以如果你跳过一些片段，其他片段可能就不完整了。然而，这最终不是什么大问题。
关于创造力的网络效应，我的意思是，TikTok上的每一个额外用户都会让其他用户更有创造力。这在每个社交网络和整个互联网上都以较弱的形式存在。连接时代意味着我们接触到的人比人类历史上任何时候都多得多。这不可避免地会累积创造力。
TikTok对此类网络效应有很强的形式。他们明确降低了重混他人内容的门槛。在他们的应用中，他们有丰富的功能，可以轻松抓取任何其他TikTok的元素并将其整合到新的TikTok中。
TikTok的Warp Scan滤镜本身就是一个奇怪的滤镜概念，但TikTok用户使用它的无数方式表明，当向大众抛出随机工具并允许涌现的创造力时会发生什么。只需要少数创新者就能释放出海啸般的模因。
Duet功能应该与Follow和Like按钮功能一起进入社交媒体名人堂。什么功能更能体现互联网的混音、反应文化？
TikTok为视频和音频提供了布莱恩·阿瑟描述的科技行业创新底层机制的组合进化形式。硅谷有多少真正原创的想法？很少。大多数在过去已经被尝试过无数次。
这就是为什么拒绝那些尝试已被尝试过的事情的公司如此危险。这是懒惰的模式匹配。
对任何创意工作者来说，最困难的工作就是冷启动。新文档中空白页面上闪烁的光标。现在想象一下，如果你超过19岁，从头开始制作一个TikTok。创意的门槛很高，你不知道如何跳舞，你跟不上最新的模因或流行音乐。
但TikTok的FYP算法和发现页面的美妙之处在于，你不必从头开始创建TikTok。