Before going to college and living with people, I basically had little contact with people in real life. The interactions at school were also superficial. I don't usually go out, and most of my social interactions are online, so you could say I've always lived in my own comfortable cocoon. It wasn't until I started living with people that I realized how wonderful it is to be with others.
Although my roommates have different personalities, they have many similar interests. They all like watching Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok) and playing Honor of Kings (a popular mobile game in China). It was through them that I was exposed to some Douyin content. Before that, my impression of Douyin was limited to occasionally coming across some funny videos and comments. Of course, I also knew that these contents couldn't fully represent Douyin, but I didn't want to explore it myself because I had some resistance to short videos.
I won't talk about how popular and addictive short videos are. Sometimes I would watch their Douyin feeds, and after a while, I realized some interesting points:
1: Unprepared reception. What does it mean to be prepared for reception? Browsing the covers and titles on the YouTube homepage is a form of preparation. Before clicking on a video, you assume that the title is not clickbait or meaningless nonsense, and you have a certain level of mental preparation for the content you are about to receive. However, on Douyin, unless you search for something, the feed on the homepage only recommends one video at a time, and the video starts playing immediately. This means that the brain has to quickly understand the video content with each swipe, which is very tiring and inefficient for me.
2: Strange recommendations. In most of the Douyin videos I've seen, the content is diverse. There are all kinds of life videos, science explanations, movie commentaries, unboxing videos, borderline soft pornography, game clips, and more. I completely don't understand what each person's preferences are. I often complain about the poor recommendations on Bilibili (a Chinese video-sharing platform), but at least I can understand what someone likes to watch based on their homepage recommendations - I can find one or a few themes. On Douyin, users can watch anything and everything, and it seems like they don't have any requirements for what they want to see.
3: Douyin's unique content format. Douyin has a lot of text-to-speech videos, and movie commentaries are always narrated by the same person. Daily videos often have a male voice that is annoying, and there are frequently edited and modified "Douyin versions" of popular music, various editing techniques and special effects, etc. It can be said that Douyin has its own unique style of content. Whether you like it or not is subjective, and personally, I don't quite understand it.
4: Butchered music and obsession with sharing. Douyin naturally has music. And there is a lot of music on Douyin. However, most of the time, you only hear a small portion of the music, and many videos use the same music. Once you start swiping through videos quickly, it becomes extremely mentally polluted. We often hear some radio edits of music, but these edits should at least follow a logical structure. On Douyin, most of the music only includes the climax of a certain part, and these parts often have various versions. For example, the opening theme song of the anime "Ling Yin" was popular before, and I could always hear it in my dorm room. Now, the trend is slow + reverb, which I find extremely disrespectful to music. The purpose of music is to provide an experience, just like reading a book or watching a video. Everything needs to have a buildup. But cutting music into fragments will completely destroy the impression of the song in people's minds. If you only leave the climax of a trance song, you might enjoy it for a while, but without the buildup, you will quickly get bored. However, the reason why this behavior can be tolerated for so long is simply because not many people care about music.
5: Fragmented completeness. Because of the unique presentation style of Douyin, users can only obtain fragmented information most of the time. After all, you can't expect a video that is less than 3 minutes long to have complete content. This kind of information can entertain the brain, but afterwards, we can't recall the themes we experienced in detail. You can only remember that you scrolled through Douyin, but you can't remember what you scrolled through. Of course, this phenomenon exists on various internet platforms, but short video platforms undoubtedly have the most severe case. Generally speaking, the long videos I see on Douyin are movie commentaries. These commentaries themselves break down a complete experience according to the creator's will. There are also occasional clips from TV dramas. I often see my roommates randomly watching random clips from random TV shows, sometimes even with strange "DJ music" playing in the background. This fragmentation of completeness is also one of the reasons why I dislike short videos.
As someone who has hardly watched short videos (except occasionally on Bilibili), the various attributes of short videos are very difficult for me to understand. This extremely fast-paced information is not suitable for my brain. I feel like I'm already a slow-reacting person, and my intelligence is also declining. I will try to avoid these things as much as possible. Occasionally, I can find something interesting on their Douyin, but because our interests are so different, I can't understand most of the things. I have also played around with Douyin myself, created an account, and only watched soft pornography content. To be honest, it was quite interesting, but it still didn't have the charm of Twitter.
I don't know how many people in Xlog use Douyin, maybe you can tell me what's fun about Douyin.