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If you’re on TikTok, you may have heard of the Bean Soup fiasco. A woman made a recipe video for an iron-rich bean soup, only to have a comment section full of people asking if they could omit the beans. While this should be a problem with an easy and obvious answer – don’t make a bean soup if you don’t like beans in soup – it demonstrates a larger problem with the direction the internet is headed.

Algorithms

The internet as it exists today defaults to a conveyor belt of advertisements with some entertainment slotted in, unless one goes out of their way to leave the big websites and visit smaller ones. Youtube’s front page algorithm shunting people into extremist circles is well documented; TikTok’s For You page is always studying your actions to make you stay longer and watch more ads. Social media websites like X, Instagram, Facebook, et cetera are much the same, relying on algorithmic interpretations of you as a person to feed you things you’ll stay and look at. Even apps like Spotify have plenty of algorithmically generated playlists to supplement the ones you made manually. If you’re not on premium, every once in a while it’ll put one on for you in the middle of yours and just… not tell you.

While this is convenient and profitable for the websites, it makes it hard for users (especially younger users who don’t remember the times before Google) to stray outside of the box. People are told constantly that websites are spying on them, that Facebook knows their blood type and zodiac sign, that Target can figure out someone is pregnant before they do, all to send them ads and make money. Now that it seems inevitable, it’s almost viewed as a trade instead of an invasion of privacy: this website can show me ads, sure, but it better know what else to show me.

To go back to the bean soup recipe mentioned at the start, users are asking if there’s a substitute for the beans because they were served the video on the content conveyor belt they’ve been using instead of subscription features, so the content must be for them. TikTok shows them videos they like and doesn’t show them things that they dislike. Instead of simply searching for another recipe, or trying substitutions themselves, they ask the content creator to fix the algorithm’s ‘mistake’ and show them something without beans in it, as if it was a choose-your-own-adventure and not a pre-established recipe.

Made for Me

To clarify, the algorithm didn’t make a mistake. TikTok occasionally tosses in videos from other niches to see if the end user will watch them too. If they don’t, they don’t get those videos again. If they do, they get more. This is a good thing, even though it creates friction, because it makes it harder to end up in the horse video corner where the only videos are videos of horses. Unfortunately, the people who want to be in the horse video corner will occasionally be shown a video about welding, or maybe grain silo fires, something tangentially related but not about horses.

The conveyor belts work too well. They make the user too comfortable. The user doesn’t want to subscribe to creators when the ‘For You’ page will conveniently shovel them that creator anyway. They forget where they used to go to find the content that they used to like, and instead rely on that website’s conveyor almost entirely. TikTok defaults to the “For You” page, not the page they themselves curated by following people. So does Youtube, where you have to click into your subscription feed. So does Spotify, where generated playlists and recommended podcasts are shown above yours. Other big websites like X slot in recommended tweets between subscribed ones; Threads, X’s competitor, doesn’t even have a purely chronological feed.

To use the websites, users must accept being shown things they don’t like; at the same time, they expect the high-quality experience that they’d be able to build themselves if the websites weren’t pushing their algorithmic feed as a replacement for it, because the building would take work but the algorithm is already made.

Side Note: You Can’t Use TikTok For Search

TikTok is a perfect storm of misinformation and poor-quality search results sorted by the wrong metrics. The app offers up a ‘popular search’ at the top of the comment section, linking to the most common search their users make after watching a given video. The problem is that the search has the same inflammatory power that headlines do! To clarify, the popular search is user-generated, not made by TikTok or fact-checked in any way. A user may see ‘[x] creator embarrassing Christmas party picture’ and continue scrolling through videos without looking, assuming such a thing must exist if searches for it exist. Or, they see ‘[x] creator is dead’ in the search and panic, assuming this must be because they missed an announcement somewhere.

Even if they do question the search and tap it, they’ll end up scrolling through videos made to exploit the search instead of answer the question. Trying to find out what slang means on TikTok is near impossible, for example. The top videos put the slang or acronym in the tags and description of the video, and then the video itself will be just music or a video of the creator looking around in front of a wall, no definition included. To be fair to those creators, even though it’s annoying, nobody should be using TikTok for research. It’s a social media app. It’s not easy for users to fact-check creators, it’s riddled with people pitching colloidal silver and borax drinks casually, and people often exaggerate or even lie about what credentials they have. TikTok is for fun and shouldn’t be for anything else. If you want to learn about an acronym, visit Google. To suggest searches in this environment may have been what users wanted, but it’s not good.

Unfortunately, the users themselves are not encouraged to search anything off the site because no app or website is designed that way. You’re supposed to stay on the site. The site doesn’t want you to leave. You probably don’t want to leave the site to find your answers, and many other apps and websites try to enable that urge to stay.

TikTok’s Appeal

TikTok is a unique website that could only exist in today’s era of high-speed data streaming and widespread high-quality digital cameras. Despite the difficulties of navigating copyright law, popular music is scattered across videos. Users argue back and forth via stitches, debunking and re-bunking arguments into infinity. Vendors host livestreams that are always on, demoing their wares. Small businesses get snarky, get personal, and get sales by showing their methods online. Oceans and oceans of content, more than anyone could ever watch, live at your fingertips on TikTok.

Platform Revenue

TikTok is pretty profitable, something its predecessors Vine and Musical.ly can’t say. TikTok’s incredible hybridization of sponsored content on top of ads and a token system is truly something to behold! The best is the token system: TikTok does livestreaming, and livestreamers can earn money from ‘gifts’ which are bought with tokens, which are bought with real non-imaginary money. Once the livestreamer gets the gift, it’s converted into ‘diamonds’ (not tokens) which can then be converted into cash or more tokens so the streamer themselves can buy gifts for other streamers. If that sounds confusing, it’s supposed to be! Tokens are imaginary money. TikTok scrapes a little bit off the top of each conversion because that’s the entire point of imaginary money. Twitch does this too, with bits, but because the bits themselves go directly to the streamer, it’s easy to track what the conversion rate is. 100 bits is about 0.70$ – how many ice cream or cowboy hat gifts does that same 0.70$ buy? Every extra step wards off the buyer thinking too hard about it.

And then there’s the sponsored content. To advertise a product you’ve been compensated to review in the US legally, you must have a disclaimer somewhere in your content saying that you were sponsored to make it. The more obvious the disclaimer is, the less likely the person making the video is to get sued. Platforms are motivated in a roundabout way to do the right thing and help creators make these connections or sponsorships as obvious as possible, because if it’s hard to make money, the big creators who bring in ad revenue will leave, and that’s no good. TikTok handles this pretty well and allows multiple levels of disclaimers to be applied to videos. Businesses promoting their own stuff on their own channel can use the ‘promotional content’ disclaimer. Businesses promoting their stuff via influencers on other channels can use a ‘sponsored content’ disclaimer. TikTok will even let them link directly to their own shops within their videos and channel descriptions once they’re past a certain follower count. What it lacks in customization, it makes up for in sheer opportunity to pitch product.

Not to mention the ads. Because ads on TikTok can be skipped immediately, the average user’s relationship with the ads is not nearly as adversarial as it is on a website like Youtube, where unskippable 15 second ads deter people from even clicking on videos they aren’t certain they’ll like. Some people download adblockers specifically to make Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. more enjoyable while they browse. Instead of trying to innovate some way to stop adblockers, TikTok just made the ads skippable. If a user can leave any time they want, they may stick around and watch a bit instead of spending the mandatory 5 or 15 seconds frantically tapping the ‘skip’ button. People like buying things! They like shopping! They just don’t like walking through the perfume section and being forcibly sprayed with a perfume they don’t like in order to access the mall.

The Bad Parts

Such a website comes with downsides, however. The full extent of TikTok’s data harvesting is concerning, but nobody seems really sure how much should be illegal – especially since many American-based companies are also harvesting comparable amounts of data, sometimes from people who don’t even have accounts on the relevant platforms, like Facebook and Google. If another website with a track record like Facebook tried to introduce such a data-gobbling app themselves, it might not have seen so much success. Until TikTok has a big conspiracy blow up in the states the way Cambridge Analytica did, though, users are inclined to enjoy the product and not think too hard about how well it knows them.

TikTok is also terribly addictive. Their algorithm is very quick-footed when it comes to figuring out what will keep users scrolling. It’s ingenious. Users can scroll for hours and feel like they’ve only been on five minutes. It’s constantly learning, too. If you stop engaging with videos for a certain fandom, it will notice, and show you less of it. If you start engaging with conspiracy videos, TikTok itself will do nothing to steer you away from videos offering genuinely dangerous advice. TikTok is especially riddled with people selling incorrect or dangerous health tips as fact: there’s an entire cottage industry trying to get their viewers to eat only meat, or only organic vegetables, or only the keto diet, or only bone broth, or only 800 calories a day. The worst part of clickbait articles saying ‘eggs will kill you’ is now combined with the worst part of algorithmic content. There are videos on TikTok right now trying to sell colloidal silver as a cure-all. The only thing colloidal silver does is turn you blue. It has no known health benefits, but the people selling it are allowed to keep selling it in spite of this.

To be fair to TikTok, this is a problem every website has (even non-algorithmic ones like Tumblr), but to be unfair, TikTok is uniquely equipped to get people addicted to conspiratorial thinking because it will never stop showing those people videos that tell them how smart they are for seeing poison in everything.

What If I Didn’t Want TikTok

It’s really no wonder everyone else is trying to keep up with TikTok.

But the question none of these sites want to answer is: what if you don’t want TikTok? What if you joined Twitter or Instagram or Tumblr on their own merits, and not because you somehow couldn’t access TikTok, which is a free app and webpage, and only needs a phone number or an email to use for credentials?

What if you didn’t want TikTok because it is TikTok?

Is there any way to avoid it? We’ll see. Video is a much more data-rich medium than text or images, but at the same time, hosting data has gotten a lot cheaper. If videos don’t turn a profit, users will see their social media platform of choice start to quietly discourage videos. If they do turn a profit, if they generate more clicks and engagement, then the videos will stay, and the web will evolve, leaving small pockets of picture- and text- heavy websites living on the fringe for the users who don’t like TikTok.

“Normal” Discourse

The internet is not and has never been a place of decorum and manners. Small pockets can be – big open areas accessible to everyone are not.

Direct, face-to-face society requires one set of rules, between strangers at the grocery store or family eating dinner together. Familiar, non-anonymous internet requires another – Discord servers and forums expect a certain level of politeness from members, but it’s a little looser than face-to-face. Jokes might be a bit ruder, and advice might be blunter, but that can be a good thing if users are trying to be constructive instead of destructive. Tone tags, a recent development that has been semi-successfully introduced in these tide-pool like communities, help ease communication further.

Past that, we get into public social media. To say people are ruder (both by accident and on purpose) is an understatement. While most people are nice just because they are, there is a small percentage of people who are nice to avoid social consequences, and once they think those consequences won’t apply, they start trolling. They may not even be doing it on purpose! The online public assumes bad faith. If something can be read wrong, it will be.

As a general trend, the bigger an online community or space gets, the worse the mood gets. Strangers get meaner to other strangers than they do to their online friends or strangers in real life. They’re more casual. They’re ‘stans’, hyper-fans of their favorite singer, who will defend them from any criticism to the death. They’re bizarrely obsessed with correcting information in forums that don’t have the space for nuanced discussions of the thing being corrected. In real life, they’re polite, but online, they don’t need to be. There aren’t any consequences outside of a potential blocking. That is, until terrible data security comes into play.

Bad Data Security

The online public is rapidly approaching the same information saturation as the in-person public. Trolls used to be mostly anonymous – now, when someone leaves a weird or mean comment on someone else’s Instagram or TikTok page, there’s a solid chance they’ve left their real name, video footage of their face, and possibly footage showing the outside of their home or major local landmarks somewhere on their profile. You could find that person. This is no longer a fuzzy, indistinct image of someone smashing on their keyboard from their parent’s attic – it’s a thirteen-year-old who just posted about their football team winning the regionals, and the guy in the Tiger mascot suit totally tripped and scraped up the head part when they all went to a local family burger joint named ‘Buckley’s Burgers’ on Swanrise Blvd. after the game ended at 8 PM, Eastern time. Their full name is in their bio, as well as their diagnosis of anxiety and their real age. Friends of theirs are shown on their profile. They probably even have their Instagram linked. Anyone could find this kid. It would be a matter of three Google searches to find the town that restaurant is in, schools in the area, and then which of those schools has a tiger mascot. That’s all it would take.

Nightmare Combination

Being so casual online about being mean, and also being so casual about the data they’re releasing, makes doxxing and cyberbullying easier than ever. The average cyberbully has enough semi-private information to send their target into a breakdown. Sure, everyone knows that people are mean online, but the data – that’s totally new. This upcoming generation of children has not been taught to avoid sharing this data. The generation of adults currently making up most of the internet does not care anymore. Constant whistleblowing about how Facebook is harvesting everyone’s data has made the average Redditor, TikToker, Instagrammer, et cetera complacent about what they’re sharing because ‘Facebook knows anyway’. Yeah – but Facebook is selling to advertisers, not giving this information freely to people who would just love to make a point out of showing up somewhere to bump into their nemesis in public.

Worse, some corners expect users to freely give out info that could put them in danger for safety’s sake. Age is a big one: labelling accounts run by minors as such is supposed to keep both adults and those minors safe, without forcing either of them off the platform. Adults can block minors, and minors can block adults, and both get to stay in their bubble and only interact with who they are ‘allowed’ to. But it doesn’t actually work that well. Firstly, kids lie about their age to get accounts with more permissions all the time, and secondly, adults do too! Having a minor marked as a minor is not a magic forcefield protecting them from harm. The same goes for mental illnesses, neurodivergencies, disabilities, and more. Demanding these labels be in a bio before a member is allowed to comment in a forum or on a video means that member now has to show the entire online public that they may be easy to lie to, that they could seize if DM’ed pictures of flashing lights, that certain pictures or audio clips might trigger PTSD episodes, and more.

If you’re a part of these platforms, remember – you don’t owe strangers anything more than base-level politeness!

In Good Faith

The culture of the clapback has been around for far longer than social media. It’s the snappy one liner that turns an argument, the callout for hypocrisy or manipulation that makes it clear to passerby the other guy is a fool. It goes back far enough that it’s written into myth! For example: it is rumored that Diogenes barged into the philosopher Plato’s lecture with a plucked chicken, shouting “Behold! A Man!”, after Plato defined a human as a featherless biped. That could be considered a clapback.

Plato and Diogenes knew each other pretty well, and Plato’s students knew of Diogenes well enough to know he was a nuisance, albeit a funny one. He was a philosopher, but he was also mostly just some guy, and by poking holes in the way Plato and others were attempting to define the world, he was forcing them to come up with better answers to these questions of meaning. His approach fundamentally altered theirs, and they were forced to consider ‘what is Diogenes going to say about the thing I’m saying?’ when pondering before sharing their ideas.

How Does That Work Out Online?

The spiritual identity of the clapback has not actually changed that much since Roman times. What has changed is the way we talk to each other in general. Social media makes reaching for clapbacks about a person’s background significantly easier than it was even ten or twenty years ago, and what people are calling clapbacks are becoming less like what Diogenes was doing to Plato and more like… doxxing, and/or bullying, especially now that the average Instagram user is much worse about data privacy than they were even five years ago. As a result, people online who think they’re making a clapback are given a huge arsenal of information to hurt the poster with, and end up overstepping a snappy comeback well into cyberbullying.

These two things have not combined well at all!

 TikTok is a shining example of this poor mix. It’s filled with kids, teens, and young adults who don’t think twice about edgy jokes and also don’t think about their posting history. In a world where clapback videos go viral on the app, it is inevitable that some of the people trying desperately to get internet famous off of the philosophy are going to completely miss the point. Instead of calling out hypocrisy, or forcing people to think through what they’re saying before they say it, they just point at something unrelated and say ‘haha, blue hair. Opinion Irrelevant’. It’s usually done to negative comments, but there’s a spectrum to how negative a comment is, and some don’t deserve what they get back in response. Especially since it’s so hard to tell when someone is actually saying something seriously, or if they’re just trying to be sarcastic and failed. There is a view- and like-based incentive to read things wrong and overreact. While commenting on a mental illness a troll has written in their bio stops them from commenting, so would blocking them.

One example: a user on TikTok made a video of a teen’s profile where a dove emoji and the phrase ‘fly high [name]’ were visible in their bio. That’s generally recognized online as a memorial for a dead loved one. That user made the video to make fun of the kid for daring to comment anything even slightly mean when they had a memorial on their profile. Another one came from ‘person A’ posting a video of themselves, and ‘person B’ leaving a vaguely impolite comment about their hair, not the subject of the video but certainly visible enough in it to comment on. Person A then proceeded to dig through a full year of Instagram photos to find a single image in which self-harm scars were barely visible in order to mock person B… for making a hair joke.

That is an insane thing to do! Worse, since neither of these were obvious grabs, it’s not even really a clapback. It’s just being mean.

Is There Room For Better Clapbacks on Social Media?

The thing about clapbacks is that they’re usually funny for most of the parties involved, even the person getting it. Someone has said something dumb or lacking self-awareness, and someone else points it out. The humor is in finding an obvious contradiction, not just saying something mean in return! For maximum effect, it has to actually be related. Diogenes storming in with a chicken, calling it a man using Plato’s criteria, is funny. Commenting on a dead relative being dead? Not really, once the shock wears off. Clapping back on someone for commenting on your hair when you both have goofy hairstyles? That’s funny. Digging through a year of photos for a 15 second response video? A lot of work for basically no real payoff.

Do It Yourself (If You Dare)

It’s no secret that a swarm of content creation accounts have made huge empires out of making things on camera. The twist, however, is that the final product is either dangerous, flimsy, or not even useful at all. You can repair flip flops with hot glue! You can make secret shelves with hot glue! You can make little dinosaur planters with hot glue! Hot glue is like 3D printing for people who don’t have a 3D printer! Don’t even get me started on the microwave. Ignore all of the people maimed by hot oil or microwaved eggs.

The content is usually either deeply unhelpful, targeted towards people with specific fixations, barely possible, or moderately dangerous. Lipstick shoes! DIY oil popcorn cookers made out of soda cans! Microwaved poached eggs! Why don’t you go ahead and pop the transformer out of your microwave and use it to burn wood? It’s only like, what, 2000 volts? It’ll kill you, and it’ll hurt the whole time it’s doing it, but the burned wood looks so cool!

This is rage bait. Cheap content not meant for humans to actually absorb and make use of. It didn’t start that way – those channels used to produce content that was bad, but still doable. When they started getting bad, or when people tried to recreate them in a funny way, Youtube (and other social media platforms) started promoting them to the front page because they were getting a lot of views and a lot of interaction. Ironically, by trying to show people how dumb and un-useful the hacks were, commentary channels only gave them strength.

Ragebait is great for views. Ridiculous stuff that could harm people trying to recreate it is also great for views. They don’t think you’ll actually make any of the stuff they feature in the video, but hey, even if you do, you’ll credit them and film it. Right? So they don’t actually need to make videos about DIYs that work.

Good channels showing projects you can do yourself still exist, but the big content farms seem to go out of their way to avoid making useful things. Nothing online can be taken at face value.

Do It Yourself (But Don’t Copy Pls)

Even when the DIYers are showing people things they made that do work, sometimes they don’t mean for other people to actually Do It Themselves. Two DIY TikTok accounts run by people with similar visions for their homes have come into conflict on TikTok: Kaarin Joy, a DIYer, was recently accused of copying TayBeepBoop, another DIYer. Both have posted videos about turning their houses into their dream homes, and both are maximalists.

Maximalism as it exists today draws in a lot of bright colors and wacky, strange, and fun furniture. There are different flavors of it (There’s a sort of Victorian kind, a Boho kind, etc.) but these two both went to the Nickelodeon School of maximalism. One cohesive color palette, a commitment to squiggly lines, and a bunch of brightly colored plastic decorations. Tay received DMs from fans framing Kaarin’s work as “an exact copy” of Tay’s projects, and decided to go through Kaarin’s account and point out the similarities as well as blocking her in a callout video. Were there similarities? Yes. Both are maximalists. Both post DIY content explaining how they did what they did. Both like the color green. Both have orange couches and both created a furniture item that could be described as a ‘moss mirror’.

But having the same style (maximalism) is not the same as copying. Tay’s moss mirror and Kaarin’s moss mirror are both the results of improvising around different problems, and they look completely different for both being the ‘same thing’. The people who tattled on Kaarin for copying were correct on a surface level, but not any deeper. Of course there’s overlap: they both like the same style. It’s like calling out a minimalist for using a lot of white in their decorating.

Even if Kaarin was copying, Tay is a content creator who shows people how she put together her home step by step! If she’s not creating stuff she intends for other people to DIY themselves, she’s doing a bad job of warning them off of it. Tay said she wasn’t even aware of Kaarin until the DMers offered her up as a copycat. Tay then went in expecting to see a shameless copier and didn’t give benefit of the doubt. Tay seems reasonable most of the time, but in this case she was pointing out years-old maximalist trends and furniture colors as evidence of copying. Furniture colors! If you were to buy an orange couch, and put some art behind it, you might be copying Tay. If you were to buy Tay’s wallpaper, which is not only in her house but also something she sells, then you’re definitely copying. Again, I want to believe the person doing the call-out didn’t actually look at what they were calling out. If she was actually saying ‘this wallpaper is copying’, she would be tacitly saying ‘don’t buy my wallpaper’. That just doesn’t make any sense. The drive to create content trips plenty of people up across all genres.

This conflict is almost inconsequential, a result of many thousands of people running out of freshly made TV drama to watch thanks to a strike and turning to online drama instead, but at the same time, deciding that using the same trends to get the same rough vibe in your house is somehow wrong is indicative of a deeper problem with creators. She knew it was petty (she says so in the video), but instead of blocking and moving on, she made a video about it. Personal twists on a larger idea are essential to style movements, not a problem with them.

DIY For Who?

Most DIY content is made, liked, and saved aspirationally. There are so many people with so many cool tips for fixing drywall, or painting a table, or doing something cool with pictures on a wall. The average person is not buying tables every two weeks and patching drywall every three days, though! The DIY content treadmill is a strange place to be, full of strangers who are looking to the creator for tips and tricks on things they may do later, or even admit in the comment section that they have no use for at all, and simply watched because the process was cool.

Chaotic videos of teens and mascots across all sorts of brands trying the Grimace shake only for something indescribable to happen to them litter social media. Why? Why does the Grimace shake inspire such a reaction?

And why did it make people want the shake more?

TikTok Advertising

It’s no secret that songs with trends attached usually do better on TikTok. Drake’s song “Kiki” started a somewhat dangerous trend of dancing beside a moving car. Tessa Violet’s “Crush” inspired a trend of makeup videos. We have evidence it works for stuff outside of music, too – Martinelli Apple Cider containers blew up big time when teens on the app discovered that they sounded sort of like apples when crushed. Not really, but the incredulity only sold more apple cider.

If you can get something to trend on TikTok, you can sell tons of it. However, this comes with a downside: once the trend is over, the sales go back down. Pink sauce comes to mind – once it was no longer a spectacle, the desire to buy it went out the window for most. Now it’s at Walmart. In many pictures, it’s in the clearance section, a rainbow of inconsistent beige-pink sauce dominating the shelf.

Grimace Shake

Knowing that, a limited, never-been-done before promotion for Grimace’s birthday was a great idea. The McRib? Shamrock shakes? Who cares, those are things the adults talk about when they come back. The real killer is something new to the teens who go to McDonald’s, and by golly the Grimace Shake delivered.

It’s purple! It’s allegedly blueberry flavored. It comes in a special cup. It’s the sort of cutesy, visually appealing, and easy to imagine beverage that social media loves. It was destined for success. But something bizarre started happening.

TikTok loves horror. They love liminal horror, they love personal horror, they love dreamlike Subway orders and nightmarish song generator accounts both featuring clever editing and implications never outright stated. In this environment, the thought “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if the grimace shake was secretly evil or something?” came to multiple creators almost at the same time. Predictably, the results were completely bizarre. The Grimace shake took on an almost Eldritch status, and consumers of it would do everything from chugging it to bathing in it to cutting to themselves in the Family Guy arm-behind-the-back death pose after drinking it. Truly, it was a phenomenon.

Marketing

Ultimately, the marketing was a huge success. Teens made funny, trendy videos with the milkshake, kids enjoyed the taste and usually never saw those videos, and since the campaign had a clear ending time, it didn’t have time to start turning cringe. People didn’t run out of ideas before McDonalds stopped selling the shake, at least. As a marketing campaign, it was about the best McDonalds could hope for from a generation of ever-more jaded youngsters looking for something fun to do. Why not make a video with a McDonalds product for the internet? That sounds fun. And it was fun. Something weird happened to a business’s product and everyone just kept running with it. It’s wholesome in comparison to the treatment brands normally get online!

Podcasts As A Visual Art

Podcasts are everywhere. They’re a more relaxed, theoretically less-edited form of content that’s fairly easy and cheap to get into. However, getting into podcasting and actually turning a profit for the work put into it are two totally different things! Spotify pays famously terribly – while podcasters make more money than musical artists, the money earned per stream is still not sustainable for most. Specialized groups like the Maximum Fun network may lessen the load by acting as advertisement and hosting, but they have their own requirements for members on their platform.

Podcasts are not an easy source of passive income unless the creator is already established. New podcasters may spend years trying to get something off the ground and never succeed! It’s an incredibly competitive field filled with many skilled people.

As such, it sort of makes sense that creators who already have an established fanbase would have an easier time putting something together, and of those established creators, creators who do something almost like a podcast – making Youtube videos – would have an easier time learning the language. If the creator is a Youtuber and they already have cameras available, they may as well film what they’re making and put that up so that listeners listening from Youtube have something to watch. Ordinary podcasters don’t tend to have a nice space they can film in, but most Youtubers at least have a desk or something. Some shows go full circle to talk-shows and play clips, even. Shows that didn’t start with video start filming to follow the tide. Podcasting now comes with video as often as it doesn’t.

Fake Podcasts

There’s a visual language to these filmed podcasts. Two or more people are wearing headphones. There’s a microphone, maybe multiple. The cameras used to film are angled in such a way that you know who is facing who if the entire cast isn’t caught in a shot (often, podcasts with visuals are edited to cut to a zoomed in shot of the person who’s talking). And, most importantly, the cast is almost never looking at the camera. They’re looking at each other, an artifact from previous podcasting eras where looking at the camera wasn’t strictly required. Looking at the people you’re talking to instead of the camera turned out to be more natural not only for the hosts, but also for the audience watching the show.

If you know the tricks, you know how to fake it!

The question is: why? Why fake it?

The majority of podcasts aren’t that prestigious, as mentioned before. However, while a podcaster could be anyone, a guest has to be ‘worthy’. To say ‘I’ve been interviewed’ and to post videos from the podcast is an affirmation that the guest is interesting and worth listening to at some level. Posting clips of an interview gives the interviewee clout and perceived status.

After that, even though the faker can’t attach a name, they can hint at the quality of the show they were allegedly on by using high quality filming and audio equipment visible in the shot. More expensive show? More expensive stuff. Therefore, they were asked on to interview at a prestigious, well-run, and profitable show with a lot of listeners eager to hear their wisdom. The “set” behind them gives hints too: Is it a podcast run for sports? Does it appeal to drama-loving gossip hounds? Are they on a comedy podcast, or a serious one?

Also, it’s just really easy to fake! The interviewee doesn’t have a name or a watermark to attach to their video, but whatever; a lot of clips of popular podcasts just expect viewers to know the names of the people in them, and they don’t really tag their Shorts or TikToks with the show’s full title. It doesn’t tend to affect how realistic a clip looks. There are hundreds if not thousands of podcasts, many of which are super popular within their niche but nowhere else, which is why the equipment quality trick works at all – being on a super popular zoology podcast doesn’t mean that any true crime podcast listener would have heard of the guest, and vice versa. If someone posts a clip of themselves talking about animals or true crime, the listener just assumes they haven’t heard of the show they were on, not that the clip itself is fake.

How To Spot It

Spotting fake clips is tough, but not impossible. Hosts rarely take snips of just themselves or just the guest. If the “guest” doesn’t have any footage of the “host”, then they can’t include it, which means it’s probably fake. Similarly, if the “guest” is not treating the equipment or environment like it needs to be treated to get the audio (touching microphones or turning their head too far away from the mic on their desk, etc.) there’s a solid chance that’s a fake.

As long as they aren’t “borrowing” someone’s image or credibility without actually being on their show, there isn’t much harm in these fake podcast clips. It’s just a weird little quirk of the internet today that fake clips are being made to sell soundbites easier.