It would be easy to attribute this to stan armies— established fans of these creators, who battle over the video in a kind of proxy war to glorify their community — but it doesn’t follow such rigid lines. “Whenever there’s a way to quantify popularity online, there’s a group mentality that emerges,” says Kat Tenbarge, an NBC News reporter who covers internet culture. “It’s something you can be a part of.”
In fact, this is not the first time that a relatively innocuous post has become the most popular on a platform. In January 2019, a Instagram post with a stock photo of an egg. It received more than 45 million likes in less than two weeks. She broke Kylie Jenner’s record for the most liked post in Instagram history thanks to a campaign of thousands of users who shared hashtags such as #EggGang and #EggSoldiers.
WIRED deemed the egg “the last of a dying breed,” predicting that popularity campaigns by ordinary users, rather than professional influencers or brands, would get less and less traction “as social media matures and develops stricter business models.” Just two months later, in a milestone for corporate social media, Indian music conglomerate T-Series He definitively defeated the streamer PewDiePie to become the most subscribed channel on YouTube, despite a campaign by PewDiePie fans involving everything from hacking printers to marching in the streets.
Simply put, since viral popularity can be directly translated into money, there are far fewer opportunities for this to happen for free. “Traditional social media platforms have established themselves as global community spaces with outsized cultural impact,” Tenbarge says. “There is clear value in mastering the metrics on these platforms, which creates an incentive for people to invest their time and attention into such achievements, even if they don’t personally benefit from it.” Halton has a real financial investment in her engagement numbers, but the campaign to boost them has already given the more casual users who started it what they wanted: a sense of community.
Beyond that, there’s the issue of how ephemeral TikTok can be. The algorithm that powers the app’s For You page is so good at finding engaging content that China has laws passed against its sale to potential American buyers, who are looking to buy the app after lawmakers passed a law in April that forces its parent company, ByteDance, to divest itself of its ownership or face a ban in the United States. The flip side of that algorithm’s power and intensity is that it blocks the more direct, organic forms of community that were the initial draw of social media.
With very few With the exception of a few, every product, community, or figure with TikTok’s popularity needs to establish a presence outside of the app to remain and remain popular, or the relentless algorithm will kick it out of people’s feeds. Stanley Quencher water bottles were a huge hit last year credited to the applicationbut this was Years later first took off thanks to a prominent review blog. Abigail Barlow, whose Bridgerton music fan written on TikTok won a Grammy In 2022, he had already launched A successful single in 2020.
Poarch presumably understood this and quickly parlayed her proverbial 15 minutes of TikTok fame into a merchandise line and music career. and moreHalton is already following suit with a Appearance on a reality showStill, Halton’s video can never match Poarch’s without some significant element outside of TikTok, because it is just that: a video. Unlike its creator, it cannot transcend the app.
For Halton’s video to break the record, there would have to be massive, targeted interest beyond the superficial sensory appeal that made the video so popular in the first place, which is nearly impossible given the heavy emphasis TikTok puts on algorithmic feeds rather than searching for specific content. The commenters on Halton’s video, who are diligently promoting the clip and monitoring the numbers every day, are swimming against the tide that brings every TikTok to their feeds.
TikTok is reportedly developing a new version of its algorithm To avoid a ban in the US, it’s worth keeping a close eye on how that algorithm shapes what users see — especially how difficult it is to work against it. The thousands of comments that register the most-liked videos on the platform show that people don’t always want just what the algorithm gives them, and the fact that they come back every day shows that they want something that will stay in their lives longer than the next swipe up.