This is The Chronicles of Trevor, the only blog that is the true Street Favorite.
If you know me, you probably are aware that I am not a fan of the popular short video platform TikTok. I have made 2 other posts about some of the reasons why I hate it, but if you want a TL;DR, here's a quick summary.
I hate TikTok with a fiery passion, because of its design and user interface, the fact that it's ruining music, Spyware, and the constant ads for it saying that it sparks good. To paraphrase Japanese tidying expert herself, Marie Kondo, it does not spark good.
This app has been one I've hated since its takeover of Musically in 2018. For those not in the know, Musically was basically the largest competitor of the 6-second legend, Vine, the app that walked so that successor platforms could run. The concept for Musically was thought up by 2 friends from Shanghai who were originally working on an educational short-form video service. Unfortunately, this concept never came into fruition. They later thought up an idea for a general purpose short-form content creation platform. This one was different from Vine, since it allowed its users to make videos up to a minute long, and could actually include music snippets, hence the name Musically. The popularity of the app was inspired by the Spike/Paramount Network game show Lip Sync Battle (a show I never really cared for). The first stable version of the app was released in 2014.
The app was originally launched for the Asian and American markets, but it later on became more of a success in the Americas, Japan, the UK, Germany, and other countries due to the marketability to younger millennials. Advertisers such as Coca-Cola were engaging with Musers (that's what Musically called users of their app) with the Share A Coke campaign.
Unfortunately, on November 9, 2017, Musically was sold to ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd., a Beijing-based software development firm known for the newsstand app Toutiao. Toutiao, lauched in 2012, is a news and information platform with an algorithm that tailors content to a user's recently viewed content on said app. This content-tailoring algorithm would be repurposed for a short-form video app in the same vein as Musically, known as Douyin (Chinese for "Shaking Sound"), launched in September 2016 as A.me. This app was the origins of the stylized eighth note, and the reason why the logo's shifted colors (in the intrusive, animated watermark that pops across the screen's edges) move as if the note was vibrating frantically. I personally believe that if the red and blue colors were gray, it would actually look more like the note is frantically shaking.
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| This logo hurts to look at. |
But I digress. TikTok was introduced in 2017, and had little popularity.That is, until 2018, after merging with Musically, and later swallowing it whole. That year, celebrities like Tony Hawk started using it. And, they decided "HEY, WE SHOULD SPAMVERTISE OUR NEW THING ON THIS OL' THING AND GET MORE SUCKERED IN!"
We interrupt this calm rant on a terrible app to bring you
Tre-vor-i-sms™
Spamvertise
verb: to show an advertisement excessively to the point that it becomes annoying and/or tiresome, in order to get more people to use your product or service.
We get it! I know you want me to download TikTok, stop with all this spamvertising
Spamvertiser
noun: A person or entity who participates in the act of showing an advertisement or commercial excessively.
These stupid spamvertisers need to stop telling me to download TikTok!
Spamvertisement
noun: The offending advertisement being played excessively by the spamvertiser.
I CAN'T EVEN WATCH ONE VIDEO WITHOUT THESE ANNOYING SPAMVERTISEMENTS TELLING ME TO DOWNLOAD TIKTOK!!! GRAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!
This has been Trev-or-i-sms. We now take you back to the rant, right where we left off.
It's like you couldn't even watch ANY YouTube video on your phone or tablet without seeing some wannabe Kartrashian having a seizure with a terrible song in the background, with that headache-inducing note logo next to it, in a low-effort, cringe-inducing trash mountain of an ad.
Again, that LOGO, that hideous LOGO! This thing has hurt my eyes since I first laid my eyes on it. It's a logo for a social media platform, and an app that's on almost everyone's device, and to have that chromatic aberration* effect on an app icon is a horrible idea, and makes the application less accessible. And the fact that they decided to put that eye-massacring effect on the letter 'O' in the wordmark is so random and terrible! Or maybe the wordmark designer, Wolff Olins, decided to put in a signature by using the O in the app name (O for Olins). There are reasons why app icons usually have 1 color for a logo and 1 background color. Recognizability, simplicity, and accessibility. Sure, if you're Google, you can use multiple colors, or if you're Meta, you can have a multicolor gradient, or if you're a game, you can have characters yelling in your face, but if you're a social platform, 2 colors is plenty.
*In simpler terms, chromatic aberration is an artifact common in faulty camera lenses and poorly-made glasses. The cause is poor light refraction from the shape of a lens. The effect is usually seen as colors shifted slightly farther than where they'd normally be. This effect is very similar to viewing a red-blue 3D image, without any 3D glasses.
Keep in mind that the wordmark was designed by the same people who are rebranding British TV channel W to U&W, which sounds like bootleg root beer from Temu.
Also, the folks at ByteDance were to lazy to make a logo for TikTok, they just recycled the Douyin logo and thought "Why don't we use this logo for that platform, since people probably wouldn't know chiz about that Douyin whatever".
Yup, I just made an iCarly reference.
But seriously, they just tried to pass it off as just an eighth note, but it's clearly just a lowercase 'd', set in a slightly thinner Bauhaus 93 font, modified to have a music note-like tail and that migraine-waiting-to-happen effect. It only makes sense if you are a Chinese person using Douyin, and not if you are an international user of TikTok.
And here's another thing. The designer of this eye-destroyer of a logo came up with the design after being at a dark concert, and seeing decorations vibrate from the loud music. If it was a dark concert with decor being affected by the vibrations of sound, wouldn't said decor being affected by vibrations have blurs of a darker version of their color? In that logic, the note is white on a black background, so the red and blue blurs should be the same shade of gray, because the note is being affected by vibrations radiated by sound waves.
Other than that, I also hate the challenges that TikTokers create. There's this one challenge where people try to mimic the tragic death of George Floyd. This is racist and extremely disrespectful to his family, and the millions who believe that he didn't deserve to die. There was the one challenge where people licked toilet seats to prove that a certain major-world-event-causing infection doesn't exist, which actually caused most challengers to actually catch it! Karma's a rabid female dog, amirite? But worst of all, is the Autism Challenge, where people imitate the movements and characteristics of individuals with (usually lower-functioning) Autism. I, as an autistic person, really hate people using the autism spectrum as an insult, or the mocking of individuals on the spectrum. Sure, I do enjoy the disability-related jokes that South Park makes, because they're not meant to be taken seriously. I mean, what can you expect from a show featuring animated paper cutout children partaking in parodically profane pastimes. But these ableist TikTokers are not as comedically genius as the dynamic duo, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Another thing that makes TikTok a hellspawn fresh from Satan's bowels is the fact that they used a the voice of a Canadian voice actress without her permission.
In 2021, voice actress Bev Standing sued TikTok Inc. (The trade name of ByteDance's US operations, founded after the success of the app), because they used a text to speech engine based on her voice, developed for a Chinese-to-English translation program, by the Chinese Institute of Acoustics. This voice, made specifically for the IOA, was being used by TikTok, in order to include a feature that allows a voice read text boxes shown in videos. Some captions included foul language, and as such, Standing thought that if they kept using her voice, it would cause "irreparable harm" to her voice acting career.
Bev's voice was portrayed as a calm, slightly robotic-sounding voice. She either wanted them to stop using her voice, or pay her royalties.
"My voice is my business. You can't just use it and not reimburse me for it. If you want to use someone's voice, pay for it." -Bev Standing, 2020
TikTok then changed their female voice to the overly bubbly, extremely grating one, based on the voice of Canadian pop radio host Cat Callaghan. It makes sense that it's a pop radio host, since that style of overly happy, valley-girl-esque voice is used by many pop stations around the Americas.
Let's not forget that music nowadays has gotten more profane and less creative, thanks to the heaping trash volcano spewing diarrhea that is TikTok. My mom recently got into this artist that is a female rapper that I thought sounded like Taylor Swift going through a twisted emo phase where she cuts herself and got away with 5 murders (even though she has started using F-words in HER music. It is so jarring to see the Parental Advisory warning on a TAYLOR SWIFT album, of all things).
There was more F-Bombs in the "musician's" only album (so far) than there are all swears in the ENTIRE EIGHT SEASONS of Game of Thrones COMBINED (about 350 in the album, compared to about 250 in GoT)! There was ONE F-bomb every 3 Seconds, 2 seconds less than your usual F-bomb-laden scene in an episode of Shameless. Oh. My. God. It's even worse than SoundCloud mumble rappers that throw N-words everywhere like candy at a St. Patrick's Day parade. If you can beat not just one, but TWO TV-MA rated original series on premium cable networks, in terms of swearing like a sailor, I'd say you'd make a fine captain on the S.S. Sopenyermouth.
Just saying...
Also, the sped up music by the Happy Hamsters.^ Why would people listen to that terrible stuff unironically? If it isn't labeled as nightcore*, or doesn't have an anime girl* as the background image, then DON'T BOTHER!
*Nightcore was a trend from the 2000s era of YouTube, where people would speed up songs, usually alternative rock. The association of anime girls with nightcore is due to the sped up voices sounding like the stereotypical high-pitched voice of anime girl characters.
^The Happy Hamsters were a 1980s knockoff of Alvin and the Chipmunks, created by the defunct Audiofidelity Records in Rahway, New Jersey. Audiofidelity would later be reestablished as Amvest Video, which was a no-budget VHS distributor, also based in Rahway.
Let's not forget that annoying "Oh No" song (actually called "Street Favorite") by Capone. This almost 2 decade old dog dropping sundae garnished in a hot snot sauce samples, and speeds up by 5 semitones, the 1964 pop classic "Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)" by the Shangri-Las, a song made popular by a 1979 cover by a local (to me) band, Aerosmith (Steven Tyler is from the town I hail from, Marshfield, MA). The way this track was mixed into "Street Favorite" sounds like Dave Seville smashing a piano with a golf club, and Alvin and the Chipmunks singing after drinking too much.
I'm sure you can see why TikTok is terrible.
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