Seen something on TikTok you fancy trying out for yourself? Who hasn’t? Welcome to the Country & Town House TikTok hub, where we cut through the social media platform’s cacophony to bring you the best recipes, trends and travel ideas you might have missed on your For You Page.
The app is considered an ancestor to popular short-form video platform of years past, Vine, which shut down in 2017. Though TikTok launched in 2016 in China and 2017 globally, it wasn’t until it purchased and merged with lip-syncing app Musical.ly that the short-form video platform really hit the big time. In August 2018, everyone who had a Musical.ly account was moved over to TikTok. Since then, the app has had more than 3 billion downloads – the first non-gaming and non-Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) app to hit the milestone.
It is famed for the mysterious algorithm behind its For You Page, which feeds users content they may be interested in with startling accuracy. Because of this, content niches have developed more successfully on the app than anywhere else, breeding new ‘Toks’ and ‘Cores’ every week (think BookTok, CottageCore, etc.). This, in turn, has had a huge influence on culture, from spawning new memes to entirely new fashion trends.
Here are our takeaways from the platform, from delicious looking recipes to makeup trends to interviews with TikTok stars shaking up the platform.
