The network effects of Tik Tok

On TikTok, you can just press the Duet button and start talking into your phone, and soon you have a side-by-side of the original video and your reaction video (youc an choose from any number of their preset layouts for reactions). That's an explicit productivity boost; I can measure it in time saved for the same output.

You can also post a question in a video and expect that some number of people will "Stitch" an answer to your question and distribute that as a new video.

A popular prompt is "Tell me you're X without telling me you're X " or any number of its variants like "Show me you're X without showing me you're X."

Stitch wasn't necessarily designed to be used in this way, but as a primitive, it's well-suited to any number of uses, including making TikTok a sort of video Quora.

According to Jeff Bezos: "When the last smart person in the room gives up on the idea." 

It also implies that you should bring some ideas back when a new smart person, or maybe a naive overconfident one, enters the room and champions the idea.

The toughest job for any creative is the cold start. The blinking cursor on the blank page in a new document. 

The beauty of TikTok's FYP algorithm and the Discover page is that you don't have to create a TikTok from scratch. The vast majority of TikToks are riffs on memes and trends that other users originate. It's no shame to be a 1 to n TikToker. Many on the platform achieve their first viral hit riffing on an existing meme.

Richard Dawkins introduced the term meme in his classic The Selfish Gene, defining it as a unit of information that spreads via imitation. He noted that memes evolve via natural selection just as in evolution.

The internet has always been a fertile ground for the accelerated breeding of memes. But TikTok is a form of assisted evolution in which humans & machine learning algorithms accelerate memetic evolution. (Memes can start from almost anything on TikTok. It can be the lyrics of a song, or just the vibe of a track, or both)