ZD 25.03: TikTok Until You Drop
Hearing the truth from strangers was fun while it lasted.
Using AI for cultural discovery, the science of caccio e peppe, Russia’s war economy, NY congestion pricing and unaliving TikTok.
The Distilled Spirit
💿 AI as a Cultural Discovery Tool (
)Multimodal AI has a lot of interesting uses. One fun one is to enable a “more like this” function in your life by doing things like pointing the camera at your bookshelf or DVD collection. To twist it a bit — you can also use this on other people’s bookshelves. Great for gift shopping.
🍝 Scientifically Perfected Caccio e Peppe (Popular Science)
This one is for the food science lovers. A team of European researchers studied one of my favorite pasta dishes to find the perfect combination of pasta, cheese, starch heat and time to get the sauce perfect.
📉 Russia’s War Economy ()
Sanctions and war have been dragging on the Russian economy for nearly three years now. Western observers have hoped there would be more signs of strain, but it seems that the war economy is playing out in a different way. High oil prices and a boom in war production has seen real gains in income for many average Russians. Tax revenues are helping to keep up with deficits. It is true that inflation is a problem, but the sanctions do not seem to be as crushing as some had hoped.
🍚Life in a Chinese City ()
Chinese Cooking Demystified is amazing for a lot of reasons. Their occasional forays into content beyond recipes is one of them. This exploration of the layout of a typical Chinese city is one of them. It is a fascinating read.
🚗 NYC Congestion Pricing Review ()
New York started charging drives to drive in Manhattan last week. The Zvi looks at it from all the angles. Traffic is way down, subway use is a bit up. There is a clear argument for a big societal benefit — even the workers paying to access the congestion zone are saving enough time that it is worthwhile for them.
I Was Today Years Old When TikTok was Unalived
Saturday night was amazing. As the Commanders pummeled the Lions on one screen. TikTok shut down on the other. True, Trump extended the deadline but he created a zombie. Sixty to ninety days is not a long time, and the serious creators have already had to make alternate plans. Even if the app survives, what changes? It's like a party where the host suddenly tells everyone to leave, only to later say, 'Just kidding!' The vibe shifts, trust erodes, and the energy that made it special is nearly impossible to recapture.
Telling the Truth to Strangers
I had heard things about it for a while, but I never tried TikTok until early 2022. I got a new phone, their paid user acquisition lured me in and I was hooked pretty immediately. Instagram never grabbed me but TikTok was raw, real and much different. Other platforms were where people went to tell lies to their friends, TikTok was where you went to tell the truth to strangers. And that was fundamentally more interesting to me so I stuck around.
It probably helped that ByteDance did a lot of things right to build a very good mousetrap. The 60 second time limit really forced creators to keep focused. Integrated tooling lowered the barrier for entry. The duet feature paved the way for lots of content riffing on other content. The For You Page created a never ending well of new things for viewers to look at — conveniently at a time when many were stuck at home looking for things to do as the pandemic stretched on.
What I saw when I spent hours lying on the couch, flipping through my FYP, was an amazing and unique place. One of the first things that jumps out at you is the self-censorship. ByteDance, being a very Chinese company, implements stringent content moderation. For example, discussions about sensitive topics like death are often avoided, leading to euphemisms like 'unaliving.' Similarly, creators refrain from mentioning other platforms, fearing repercussions such as content takedowns or shadow bans. These measures reflect the company's broader cultural and regulatory context, shaping how users interact and express themselves. Their tools take things down without warning nor with much recourse. And the sensitivities were wide. Death was not to be discussed, so it became unaliving. I learned lots of interesting spellings of the word “sex.” People do not discuss other platforms for fear of being shut down. Euphemisms abound.
Beyond the coded language there was a wild and wonderful window into modern culture. TikTok really was where the cool kids hung out. It was a breeding ground for viral trends, from dance challenges like 'Renegade' to catchphrases that dominated pop culture. Creators used the platform to launch careers, establish unique identities, and engage with a global audience in a way that felt immediate and authentic. The sheer variety of content, combined with its algorithm's ability to surface niche communities, made it the ultimate destination for anyone wanting to be part of the cultural zeitgeist. Catchphrases and trends were originated, tested, refined and distributed from there. It was an amazing window into a lot of worlds easily viewable with the flick of a thumb. There are many things I will miss.
As Seen on TikTok
The platform helped give a number of creators a start — the ease of entry really did open things up. In between the fluff, the pirated TV shows, the strange TikTok shops and wild rants there were many great things. Here are some folks I really enjoyed from my time on the platform.
Cooking
One of the first things I did when I got the app was took a deep dive into cooking. I had been doing a lot of it thanks to the pandemic and I wanted to learn more. I learned a lot of technique in sixty second chunks. Here are some folks worth following:
What not to do is important. Chef Reactions taught me important lessons in that field. He made really aggressive use of the duet function to get there. He is cross posting to Instagram if that is more of your jam.
Olivia is a private chef in the hamptons. She likes punk music and tells you like it is. Recipies and knife technique are worth emulating. She is also on IG these days.
I love a good sauce. Chef Thom Bateman’s All About the Sauce is an an amazing and effective sauce cook book.
Tinned fish is taking off. The Tinned Fish Review channel should be commended for their enthusiasm for the subject alone.
Lots of otherwise famous chefs are on the platform too. Kenji shares some short quips and explainers on his TikTok when he is not exploring every Teryaki shop in seattle.
Advice and Self Discovery
Telling the truth to strangers makes for great self-help content. The honesty and clarity of the brief, one-on-one video format was a really effective learning tool. Finding ways to mix entertainment with serious talk about things like ADHD also resonated. Here are some things worth looking at:
Chris Williams has lots of great advice about leadership. He has a very established presence a lot of places, but his TikTok channel was especially refreshing.
Ashley Herd helped my leadership EQ a lot on her Manager Method channel.
Eric is the Life Actuator and he is the first person to effectively explain my ADHD to me. He does amazing skits about the subject — and brings the challenges to life. His content is also very helpful in explaining your ADHD challenges to the people around you. He can catch him on YouTube and IG.
Technology
TikTok turned out to be a wonderful platform to study technology on a few levels. The sixty second format really lent itself to fast, sharp tutorials. I learned tons about using PowerPoint and lots of things I did not know about Excel on the platform. There was also a thought leadership angle. Here are some channels and leaders I enjoyed.
Kat Norton is Miss Excel. She combined dancing and her love for excel into a booming social media and training business.
Scott Hanselman has been a fixture in the Microsoft developer community for the last decade or more. His TikTok was a really fun window into his other side. I enjoyed exploring vintage computing and 3d printing with him.
Nate B Jones does a great job with technology career advice and weaving the context around the ongoing rush of AI news together. He can also be found at
.
Variety Show
Beyond food, self-help and tech and wedged in between the massive amount of pirated materials and narrated reddit brainrot videos there were many amazing things on the platform. Here are some of my other favorite creators worth keeping an eye on:
Writer Jeff Pearlman shares a lot of stories from his decades in journalism, largely around sports figures and subjects of his books. Great depth to the stories. He also has a substack at pearlman.substack.com.
Nate Petroski is one of the classic TikTok creator stories. He is a homesteader in West Virginia and started sharing about how he was creating his homestead day by day. He is truly endearing person working on an interesting project. You can catch him on IG. Fear not — Minion is coming too.
As a parent of a gen alpha child, I need help translating. I started this training with Mr. Lindsay, a middle school teacher who tells you what life is like on the inside. I am going to miss the translations.
Kyla Scanlon explained economics on TikTok before coining the term vibecession and blowing up. You probably know this but she has a substack; her perspective on the TikTok ban is spot on. See more at
.Patrick Hicks found a groove sharing stories about bands and musical acts. His content was compelling and who does not love hearing the back story about some of your favorite artists? Find him on
on Substack. His eulogy for TikTok gives you a sense that the loss many creators are feeling.
The Day the Music Dies
To be clear — ultimately the demise of TikTok as it is built today is probably a net good thing for America. The app's design, though innovative, raised concerns about potential misuse, such as promoting disinformation or manipulating cultural narratives. Additionally, its opaque content moderation policies and ties to the Chinese government heightened fears about data security and surveillance. These factors underscore why its current structure is problematic for national interests. It is not so much the data the app gathers; that is the sorts of things that one could easily buy from any large scale data broker. Or, as it turns out, the CCP could just track your phone directly. TikTok is a tool that could be an offensive propaganda weapon. The platform’s mindshare it is a ticking time bomb. Could it be used as a perhaps a digital cultural trojan horse? Excising it — or at least a Chinese-controlled version of it — is ultimately the right move for America. I will miss it, but only so much.
The Look
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