boy if I was told I'd be defending tiktok in 2018 I would not have believed it
I think 2018 was the height of TikTok cringe compilations and that was when it was really popular to hate on it because adults love to dunk on things kids like, so I'd definitely joined in on the 'ha ha look how cringey and stupid these kids are' trend. Funny enough that this is the era _confused_piplup_ misses the most, but I think this actually highlights something important - I think every social media platform has gone through all the stages described here in this thread. YouTube way back when was also just full of unpolished content of bored kids with blurry webcams doing random and silly things and just having fun, which is reminiscent of the content piplup said they missed on TikTok now. Back then, adults would also shit on YouTube and call that kind of content cringey and stupid, but it's since grown into a lot more than that and is a staple to old and young people alike.
I think TikTok is going through the same transitionary period or already has, since it's not growing as a platform during the same ancient wild west of the internet like YouTube grew in. It's grown exponentially in a much shorter time, because we are familiar with this already. People are learning they can make money on this platform much quicker than they realized this with YouTube, they know they can find fame and clout here already, because we've seen this kind of explosive growth already on all the similar platforms that came before it.
Yeah, people do dumb things on it but it's like any social media platform that exists to be used by millions and have a lot of kids on it. Faking mental illnesses or doing anything for attention is not unique to TikTok.
The Tide pod challenge actually originated on YouTube, which I think is a good example that shows the problem isn't necessarily TikTok itself, it's dumb, impressionable kids and dangerous trends, and those unfortunately exist on every platform. I think what it does have is a uniquely powerful algorithm and an insanely wide reach that makes it really good at spreading the best and the worst of it.
On top of that, I think it has a really bad rap from still being known as/associated with musical.ly and stuff like kids lip syncing to Justin Bieber next to their dying grandpa (this is a real video) but it's grown into a lot more than that, which, yes, includes people faking disorders for attention, but also good content of every genre, comedy, memes, tutorials, educational posts, cat videos, political content, giving new artists an opportunity to get out their original music (good and bad) and pretty much anything else you can think of. The algorithm is scary good at learning what you like, so if you just consistently don't watch the content you don't like, it will pretty quickly learn to just mostly show you the stuff you want to see.