Tik­Tok was a balm dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. What began as a sil­ly app for dances became the great­est visu­al sto­ry­telling mech­a­nism since Face­book first tried piv­ot­ing to video. Unlike Snap, Tik­Tok was wild­ly intu­itive, a new video just a quick swipe up and away. The algo­rithm was smarter and the con­tent bet­ter than any­where else online, which of course, is why it had to die.

For any­one old enough to remem­ber the Cold War, we’ve been invent­ing rea­sons to be afraid of things every­where for­ev­er. We’ve had issues with the Chi­nese since they came to Amer­i­ca and built the rail­roads. I wish things had evolved to a place where we could embrace inter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion and coop­er­a­tion, but here we are. I wish we had a keen­er under­stand­ing of how mis­in­for­ma­tion gets dis­trib­uted and how “legit­mate” chan­nels have been used to do this for as long as they exist­ed. I mean, “remem­ber the Maine” was mis­in­for­ma­tion. WMDs were mis­in­for­ma­tion. Those were far more cost­ly in lives than Tik­Tok, yet here we are.

This is a requiem for a meme.

Do you remem­ber the first trend­ing audio that sucked you in? For me, I think it was the bad­die dance trans­for­ma­tion and things spi­raled from there. It’s per­fect that I’m obsessed with the weird Twit­ter ener­gy of Lit­tle Sleepy Demons as the sun sets on TikTok.

But what about the friends we made along the way?

I for­get when exact­ly I joined, but it was late, rel­a­tive­ly speak­ing. That said, I was imme­di­ate­ly hooked. It trans­formed how I con­nect­ed with my social media col­leagues, and the con­tent helped me work through things relat­ed to fam­i­ly and career that I did­n’t real­ize were such wide­ly shared expe­ri­ences. I dare­say that in impor­tant ways, Tik­Tok healed me.

As lay­offs hit me and so many oth­ers start­ing in 2023, Tik­Tok was a place where peo­ple open­ly dis­cussed — if not filmed out­right — their lay­off. It was like watch­ing the entire notion of employ­er brand vapor­ize in real time. There was a real fear­less­ness that came to life there through the mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z users who at times bared their souls to the app, hop­ing to find some­one who could relate. In some impor­tant ways that con­nec­tion, vir­tu­al though it may be, was a salve for the iso­la­tion and lone­li­ness that plagues so many of us.

Bar­ring an unlike­ly reprieve, I ful­ly expect Tik­Tok to dis­ap­pear just like Vine did, or how MySpace and Friend­ster did before that. There will be fee­ble clones. Peers like YouTube and Insta­gram will try to cap­ture that ener­gy, but nei­ther real­ly deliv­ers. It’s the demo­graph­ics that count. It will be sore­ly missed. Noth­ing gold can stay.