First, it was Vine. Now, it’s TikTok.
Exactly eight years ago, Vine shut down. With it, came its culture: entertaining six-second videos that felt invaluable. Now, TikTok will begin crashing in just two days, marking the end to countless viral videos, catchy sounds and out-of-pocket jokes.
Looking back to January 17, 2017, the internet was stupefied. There wasn’t a clear direction or app for content creation and doom-scrolling in a post-Vine world. The same looming experience is true for TikTok users looking for the next greatest app ahead of the ban taking effect on January 19.
The natural transition for the internet would be to make an alternative social media app, the new TikTok, but it seems unlikely that anything will immediately replace TikTok’s grasp on the internet. Rather, the internet will follow the pattern that occurred in 2017.
The pattern is this: internet youth redefine what content is most engaging, users then flood the internet landscape with attention-grabbing posts from a trendy, newly discovered app and piqued curiosities would catalyze the internet’s migration.
I believe that young media will follow the trend when users congregated on Musical.ly/TikTok: a hot new app offering fresh, and possibly underground, content will catch our attention. However, there will be time before any app emerges as the internet’s playground for humor and culture.
This movement was exemplified when the internet turned from Vine — an app of six-second comedy — to Musical.ly, a music and lip-syncing video platform that later was merged into TikTok. In June 2016, Musical.ly had nearly 90 million users. In May 2017, four months after the Vine ban, there were over 200 million Musical.ly users, according to Billboard. The period in between these jumps in downloads consisted mainly of Musical.ly videos being reuploaded to Snapchat and Instagram. In short, visibility and fresh content drove downloads.
At the time that Twitter shut down Vine, creators and users also pivoted to YouTube, where they could post nearly anything, similar to TikTok’s freedom to post and be seen. Despite this environment, people eventually flocked to a more focused TikTok algorithm. In its first few years, TikTok’s most popular videos were dances. That still didn’t deter YouTube and Vine users. They downloaded TikTok anyways.
According to Business of Apps, an informational and marketing website built to connect businesses, there were 150 million TikTok downloads in 2017, 807 million in 2018 and 1.5 billion in 2019.
Now, moving from TikTok means leaving videos spanning cooking, pop culture, humor, aesthetics, storytimes and dances among other genres. The loss simply feels too great for any existing app to fill (Instagram has the versatility but will always be seen as a photo-first social media app, not video-first).
To be clear, TikTok likely won’t (technically speaking) shut down — or be mysteriously removed from most of our phones — on January 19, according to NPR. It is more likely that the app will have bugs, glitches and no new posts or updates, based on what government officials and TikTok executives told NPR. In short, it will be slowly phased out.
It is unclear at this time what President-elect Donald Trump would do for the app, if he chose to act.
TikTok users have been accustomed to curated algorithms, although at the expense of threats to data and information. Of course, those reasons among others have motivated officials to uphold the ban.
Naturally, creators have recommended substitute apps in place of TikTok: Lemon8, which has similar content styles and the same owners as TikTok, RedNote, an app described by USA Today as the “Chinese version of Instagram” and Instagram’s pre-existing “Reels” feature.
According to an Axios report, Lemon8 would face the same restrictions as TikTok on January 19 — the apps would lose new content and accessibility in the United States.
But for now, TikTok users, myself included, should take time to revel in its last few glitch-free moments, scroll through a few Reels, potentially explore alternative apps and wait for the new social media app to emerge.
Redmond (Reddy) Bernhold is a junior studying biochemistry and journalism. He originally hails from Minster, Ohio but calls Siegfried Hall his home on campus. When not writing, he explores South Bend coffee shops and thrift stores. You can contact Reddy at rbernho2@nd.edu.
