Over a long period of time I have been thinking about this, and at the beginning of the year I remember telling my creator buddy that I no longer care about TikTok. Which is crazy to hear because I’ve always been an avid champion of it.

After the initial “Ban” last year I felt that the platform has never been the same. I know I’m not the only one because “uncanny valley” was trending a ton after it came back after a day.

The algorithm changed, and it has a couple times since then too. The parent company presumably wanted to not sell it’s proprietary algo with this forced sale going on in the US. Supposedly at the time of this writing it is getting sold to Oracle, which I don’t think is a good idea.

Not the most trustworthy company, and I worry too about Palantir.

The growth on the platform as well has been stifled, and I’ve seen a lot more progress on Instagram or YouTube comparatively.

On the other end of this post: Twitter. No I’m not calling it “X” that is stupid, and truly ever since Elon took over it has been nothing but downhill. Threads just now surpassed Twitter in userbase as well, which is interesting to note.

Why am I making this post?

Well part of what makes this channel useful is the meta-commentary on what is going on in the creator world.

I scheduled out 2600 clips across a couple of new channels for my two podcast shows. I made a new instagram, and a new youtube for each, but not a new tiktok?

Let’s not get into the annoying complexity that is Tiktok’s login system, as I haven’t even been able to add my phone number for half a decade because after I got a new phone it wanted me to confirm the change on my old phone number. #silly

Over the years I’ve seen TikTok become less and less important in the overall scheme of things. I’ve repeatedly said that you should syndicate your short form videos across all the platforms you can.

I still do to my main tiktok account, but if that ever got blocked or something I probably wouldn’t think twice about making a new one.

Had I been able to make clips years ago I think it would have been better, but since my growth is stagnant. Other people’s too, and not getting out of the 200-300 view jail. It just doesn’t seem worth it anymore, the first/second/third mover advantage is gone. I had all three, but I couldn’t execute well enough. I digress.

Twitter lost most of its actually interesting users to Blusky, and Substack Notes if I’m being completely honest.

All that is left on there for me is the knowledge management people, which half are on other platforms as well. Then there is just the echochamber of political extremists, crypto-bros, and AI fan boys. Now I’m a fan of AI sure, but most of the tools post to LinkedIn just as much as Twitter. Meaning there is no reason to even need to be on there. While I’ll keep syndicating my posts to both of these platforms. I won’t be going out of my way anymore.

How should you proceed?

Look if you like Twitter then that’s great, same for Tiktok, but I would be very concerned for your privacy and data. Not only did Twitter announce that basically everything is feeding into their AI Grok, but most of the artists left because of their lax take on copyright issues.

Tiktok is probably going to start selling your data 5 times as much as it did before. Yes, I know that all of these socials run on data, but to be honest I never had an issue before. It was pretty minimal when Bytedance owned it, but considering how ruthless the US can be on data-acquisition I think it is going to be a lot worse now.

If you have the automation already set up, then I don’t think you should turn it off. Just don’t go out of your way anymore for these platforms.

Twitter upped their API costs too, so most tools didn’t want to keep supporting it. Tiktok has made it annoying over the years too. I remember back in the day having a really hard time finding a tool that supported Tiktok, and most of them could only send to the “tiktok inbox”, which made it really annoying for me.

Until they finally let you do it directly. I should also note that Capcut, tiktoks editing tool, has had a huge drawback due to their terms of service changing. If you haven’t heard, it basically states that anything you upload to them to edit in your videos, then can be used by them in any way they like.

I guess take everything with a grain of salt. I’m not particularly salty myself, but this has been on my mind. I actively chose not to make new tiktoks even though it would be wise for me to syndicate my clips again.

I only go onto twitter for literally two people to DM.

These platforms keep digging deeper and deeper holes, and I don’t think it is worth your precious time as a content creator to waste on them anymore.

2026 Update:

After moving all of my posts from substack over to here, I thought hmm I should add a new take too.

If anything my resolve is only growing stronger towards the sentiment shared only a few months ago. However after the acquisition of Tiktok recently by Oracle, it is already becoming a state controlled media machine.

If you search terms like "zionist", "iran", or "epstein", then you automatically get filtered out, or worse flagged as hate speech (if its a comment).

This is what a lot of us techies have been warning the masses for a while now, and it has most certainly gotten to the path of 1984 no doubt. I deleted the app off my phone instantly, and I have no intention on going back. Thanks to my Nuelink automation I still post there, so I can support my followers. However I may even turn that off at some point.

I do not trust my data there, and it sucks considering how much I loved the platform pre-covid.

I met so many amazing people, and one thing I did a year or so ago is I copied the list of all of my followers/following. Now I did try to find an automation tool, but nothing really worked or were trustworthy. Thus what I did was just go on desktop and painstakingly go down the whole list highlighting it along the way. Copy and pasting to my obsidian doc. Just simply so I can have some sort of reference of the people I connected with over the last better half of a decade. Now most people that are most important I have already connected with off platforms.

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As for Twitter nothing really has changed. I still see the faults of echochamers, terrible UI/UX glitches, and really there are rarely any reason for me to go on there and consume the content. Threads does a 10x better job.

As for an alternative to Tiktok I have a feeling that Upscrolled is going to be a really big name in the coming years.