First one’s free. It’s an addiction mechanic trying to exploit your psychology that should be illegal.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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It’s called a hook.
And yes it’s intentional by the algorithm to keep you engaged.
Just like a slot machine. Good ol visual drugs.
Sounds like a bad algorithm that drops you like a hot potato instead of, say, gradually decreasing your numbers though, no?
First time doing drugs then?
Huh?
That’s kinda the point.
You’ll spent a disproportionate amount of energy trying to create content to hit that same dopamine hit it just gave you, it won’t push your content, after a bit you might get better numbers but overall nothing close to the initial one, you’d feel okay with that plateau, then another spike on a random video, and then back to the shallow waters with you so you can continue chasing shadows.
It’s an engagement trap distilled to a science, and I recommend avoiding it like the… something worse than a plague because that analogy apparently didn’t go all that well.
So OP can expect more spikes in the future? I was working under the assumption that it's only the first video that is pushed (because that's what OP described). That does make the whole scenario more plausible. (I know how dopamine traps work in principle, that's why I'm not on tiktok)
That line of thought is precisely why people engage with it and wait for that next hit.
Best suggestion I can offer is: don’t.
Well yes, I'm trying to work out what exactly they're doing and what it is that OP is seeing because I have no experience with tiktok (and I don't want to).
They have a lot of other people to hook and you can' give every one inflated views.
Yep.
It’s mostly fake. But it’s all deliberate.
When you use TikTok, remember that.
These algorithms have already been compromised by AI-generated videos. It's time to move to the Fediverse, where you can pick a server with rules and content that match your preferences—or create your own. That's better suited for experienced users, but the real challenge is that most people struggle to decide what they want to see in their feeds 😅
We are already on lemmy
Most likely they throw the first one in a wide net to see what reaction it gets. Then if there isn't much engagement it won't push newer content as much.
If you're asking whether someone at tiktok HQ saw your success and was green with envy and said "nope, we're not showing that person's videos to people anymore" and flipped a switch to hide your videos, then no.
yep, but here's the thing: why wouldn't TikTok do that? They give you a dopamine hit just so you get hooked and always chasing to get that high again? Sounds likely to me.
Ah, I see. That I don't know, I have successfully avoided tiktok like the plague (because I know my brain would just overdose on the dopamine). But I suspect that if that were how they run things, we'd see a lot more complaints like yours. Also, such blunt mechanisms tend to leak and be reported on, especially when a service comes under close scrutiny as tiktok has. So just based on my experience with how the internet works, I doubt it.
Edit: I may have made some wrong assumptions when I wrote this, idk.