Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

At any given moment, two of the five trending memes up at the top of the page are TikTok things. Every single thing that happens on Tiktok gets an article here. KYM is practically a news site for TikTok trends.

Can we just make a separate site for TikTok already? It gets tiring always having every new low-effort trend plastered all over the site.

you could say the same for NSFW Images.

Find another way to cope, TikTok is the future and the dominant meme-father of the net now

I have no qualms with documentation of garbage memes
my problem is the fucking staff frontpage every goddamn thing that happens on that cancerous sore on the internet

At this point, we might need an another stat forum post of how many TikTok memes are made similar to the Trump forum post

Would be nice for someone to get around to letting us filter them out a la ponies
but that wouldn't make money, so it won't happen

Way ahead of you

Could we get an actual response please?
every single thing that even somewhat gains traction gets frontpaged
just treat it as any other sitre

As Artichoke stated, TikTok as a whole is pumping out internet trends, and considering a high amount of internet traffic is no longer monopolized by nerds, but regular people who use social media and looking to have some fun in an online space, it makes sense that a popular social media platform pumping out memes is going to get the site more clicks.

Moving TikTok trends to a new site is counterproductive to a website that relies on internet traffic to stay afloat. You want an honest answer? You could just ignore those TikTok entries, like I do, as they are not being forced into your internet diet. It’s honestly really obnoxious hearing the same complaint over and over from you guys about how TikTok memes are bad, when you could honestly just ignore them and go about your day like a normal person.

As stated before, It's because they're frontpaged

And as I just stated, you can just ignore it. Why is it such a big deal to you that memes from a popular site get front paged? Because there are so many? Because they don’t appeal to you? What?

TikTok has more US accounts than Twitter does. Good, bad, or indifferent, this inherently means that there is going to be a lot of potential in things to document. It doesn't make sense, indeed it seems antithetical to the site's goals, to arbitrarily say that memes from one website should not be documented.

Please note, this should not be seen as an endorsement of TikTok memes nor for that matter, the percentage of those receiving entries or being frontpaged. Staff are actually paid to write entries, so it makes sense they would want their work to get noticed to increase traffic. While there are hundreds of other memes that I know need entries, many of these are difficult to do research on due to their age and website/archive decay. TikTok seems easier to track trends and most of these memes are recent, meaning that it is likely easier to make a relatively complete entry.

Additionally, remember that anyone can create entries for the site. Staff might be hesitant to make an entry on an obscure or older meme where they have little ability to find the origin. However, if an entry is started and has a gallery to go with it (and feel free to contact mods with media powers to move existing images on the site there) then admins are more likely to take notice and potentially frontpage.

TL;DR: Having memes from one website removed I do not see happening. While I may not agree with there number of them getting frontpaged entries, there really aren't a lot of users making large number entries, and TikTok memes (and politics) are easy to research, while also being made when they are still popular to gain views. I don't really see the statements in the previous sentence changing anytime soon.

"tiktok gets lots of documentation because there are lots of things going on there!"

And 99% of them are low-effort trash """"""memes"""""" that end up forgotten in a week when the next new trend pops up. We don't need KYM frontpaging every single new thing tiktok does.

I'm not asking for a complete ban on tiktok memes, just stop frontpaging every single thing they do.

"they are not being forced into your internet diet"

Look up at the trending bar, which appears at the top of EVERY SINGLE KYM PAGE. At any given moment, two of those five thumbnails are TikTok shit.

Yes, they are being forced into my face. "hurdur just ignore xddd" doesn't fix anything and is just an admission that you're too lazy to do anything about something a lot of users have complained about.

Searching "tiktok" brings up 850 entries.

Eight hundred and fifty entries, five times as many as Trump had, all from one website. Only for the admins to keep handwaving it with "hurdur just ignore it XD"

That's an unfair assessment. Some entries might just mention Tik-tok. More accurate number would be 482 which is amount of entries returned when using query 'origin:"Tiktok" ' (plus 4 more from ' origin:"Tik tok" ').
While I agree that not every single Tik Tok trend should be front paged, the idea of a separate site documenting only Tik Tok's is very poorly thought out, due to redundancy and the way website promotion works.

I think the main issue is that many of them are lacking in notability, spread outside their origin site, or longevity. That is to say, deadpool material.

A separate site altogether isn't the right move, but putting all the brief trends and fads onto one article is the best option.

> TikTok memes (and politics) are easy to research,
That's because the only thing the staffs do is just go in the TikTok. trends and pick a trend that worthy to be frontpaged. A trend that just last less than a week or so.

The only politics that gets frontpaged is nothing but drama and controversy. I just see it as the staffs only do it because it gets views and clicks for people to argue in the comments.

> just ignore it

It's been over 2 years, i think people are far past of ignoring it.

It looks vague to me since we don't know if the entries are directly related to TikTok or not

TikTok's Sub-Entries section only has 337 entries and still growing

At least it still passes the amount of Trump memes since it's currently at 229 entries

I understand the importance of documenting TikTok trends from a purely objective standpoint and I do not question it, but…

"it makes sense that a popular social media platform pumping out memes is going to get the site more clicks."

This statement in particular I found something odd about, and, after a bit of digging, I know why. Turns out that TikTok entries, in fact, do not give the site nearly as many clicks as some people say they do, which you can corroborate by yourselves if you are skeptical.

By manually checking the first 5 or 6 page loads of newest TikTok entries (8 per load on my screen, so make that about 40 TikTok entries in recent days), the only TikTok-originated entries I could find with 5 digit views on them were this one and this one, with 95K and 42K views respectively. All the rest were lucky if they got to 4 digits (most stayed at 3, even some frontpaged ones), and that includes all the recently frontpaged ones, with "recently" meaning about 9 days ago or a bit more, so we are far from talking about a weekly occurrence here since no TikTok-originated trends the last 7 days made any significant splash. This also included the few ones that actually got KYM people to comment more on about for any reason which still got like 5K views at most, so the site's sporadic personal interest on them is not a big factor either.

If the argument, then, is mainly about site clicks and internet traffic to keep the site going, we can say that the average single NSFW image on the first page of Trending (just one of them – keep in mind that we get several of them per day) gets more clicks and views than the average frontpaged TikTok entry save for the rare 5 digit exceptions every 2 weeks or so, and it would be a mathematically accurate statement impossible to dispute, since image and entry views are public to everybody. It does put into question just how much of that research effort on TikTok trends, regardless of how easy or how little of it there may be put, is truly worth it then, when content that is miscellaneous to the site's purpose uploaded with exactly 0 effort to it is outdoing its performance on a daily basis by no small margin, and despite the fact that it gets no frontpage space and is filtered out by some people.

I have not checked political entries to know if this applies to them as well, though I suspect that those are somewhere between more than TikTok entries and less than NSFW images in terms of views.

(Picture unrelated - just putting this here as a reading break for your eyes, as I realized that this is hard to read on a white background with how lengthy it is)

So yes, in the end, this seems like less of an effort to document truly interest-rich TikTok trends and more of an attempt at desperatedly capturing the next Hit or Miss/I'm Already Tracer thunder and hopefully rake big numbers from it. A bit of a fool's errand, if you ask me. The numbers do not lie.

I am no website manager of any kind and I do not like to tell people how to do their own job, but if my personal input had any value on a boardroom suggestion sitting about how to make the site lucratively better while staying true to its purpose, I would simply suggest to find and frontpage more stuff like this at the same rate that TikTok trends are currently being frontpaged at, then drop TikTok frontpage rates exponentially in correlation to that, perhaps to less than daily rates if needed. It takes even less effort than TikTok research, gets far more views and it does not annoy anyone, instead being actually enjoyable. Basically, do that thing where they find one last image each day to frontpage before ending the work day, but doing it much more often and looking outside of KYM for it. And no, an automated bot doing that for random Reddit posts that get 50 views each does not count. No, those weird "collection" things you guys do sometimes do not count either. I saw the views for those and they are not doing any better. People like their content bite-sized here for the most part, so you cannot really get most people's short attention with those. The same happens for most video frontpages, from what I can tell, and for the same reason, I would wager.

"But then what new entries will be made each day?"

Honestly..? I do not think we need daily new entries as an implicit requirement. That would come with the implication that there is something worth that level of documentation and effort to be found every day, and that is not really the case for internet memes and trends using a traditional definition of those words. Lazy days are still a thing there, and not every day presents entry-worthy material, let alone being frontpaged as well, and there is nothing wrong with that. That is beyond KYM's control regardless.

I am not saying we should just be Reddit 2.0 putting random crap we find online in the frontpage, but if it is specifically about replacing the act of daily TikTok frontpages, I would suggest this as an alternative that is both easier and more lucrative, and it still beats being BuzzFeed 2.0, anyway.

Just my honest thoughts. Take it as you will.

everything you say is boring

The truth is boring.

I like how I've gotten warnings for things like this but they let you be a complete dick to everyone

Fun fact! Saying users should be dead is not equivalent to calling them boring.

As for the thread content: lmao what the fuck? I'm struggling to figure out why the source for a meme is somehow problematic enough for us to either:
a) Not create entries for them
b) Create a new website which would like, magically pay for itself.

KnowYourMeme is a documentation resource that happens to generate revenue through ads, not an entertainment site that happens to document things. There is no obligation to trim content that bothers users, and especially not for a reason as shallow as "too much TikTok". The platform is influential and produces viral content, we don't get to choose that. Users made the same arguments for Twitter a few years ago, and the response was the same then. If your grievance is that you think TikTok content is being preferred over that from other platforms, it may be time to consider than you are using less popular platforms.

Out of today's trending bar, I see a single TikTok meme. If this makes KYM "practically" a site for TikTok trends, so be it.

"If your grievance is that you think TikTok content is being preferred over that from other platforms, it may be time to consider than you are using less popular platforms."

Nah, my grievances are a combination of:

-TikTok trends are low effort garbage that are forgotten within a week
-The admins keep frontpaging every single one of them despite the aforementioned garbage quality
-At any given time, there are either one or two tiktok memes at the top in the trending bar

It's pretty obvious that TikTok is paying for articles and exposure here; there's no reason why so many low-effort """memes""" from a single source would constantly get frontpaged.

I understand the frustration of not being able to tailor the frontpage to specific interests. It's something I've wanted to have implemented on the site for awhile. The basic concept would be give users the ability to "subscribe" to certain topics and "unsubscribe" to others, we just haven't been able to get this done on a development level yet.

As for what KYM covers, part of our mission is to be a comprehensive internet culture database covering as much of the viral internet as possible. This will undoubtedly include memes, communities and platforms that aren't liked by everyone. I used to get a lot of flak for frequently covering Reddit Advice Animal memes when that was a thing. I personally didn't like a lot of the ones I would cover, but that's not the point. We don't cover internet trends and topics because we like them, we cover them because our mission is to document viral phenomena on the internet.

This is enough of a recurring issue (MLP memes, Advice Animals, controversies, etc) that I do think we will need to implement a type of customized frontpage that will allow people to select certain topics that want to see at some point.

TikTok paying for exposure on KYM seems unlikely, given the difference in size and relevancy of the platforms.

More likely, it's either that at least one person responsible for the trending bar and the front page either really likes TikTok or is under the mistaken impression that it's well-viewed or well-liked on the site.

A good idea
I hope it gets implemented

Kind of like what FunnyJunk has..? I am all for it if so. That should exponentially increase the site's viewing preferences even more than the NSFW and Subculture filters on galleries (which would be even more helpful if they could be applied when viewing images sorted by Newest, by the way), though I understand these things take time to implement.

I'm not sure how that, despite the many "KYM shows content I don't like!!!" threads over the years, the "trending" functionality isn't understood.

If something on the site gets more "attention" than other pages in its category, it trends. This means:

• Images that get a lot of views likes, comments, or favs in a short order. This is why porn trends.
• Image Galleries whose images get the most attention (as per above).
• Entries that get a lot of comments, media uploads, likes, or edits. New entries tend to hit trending because the edits that go into making them count towards "trending", and the appearance on the main page/top bar attracts clicks.

There is nobody "responsible" for the trending bar except for the users. This is why we can make GamerGate trend for fun by commenting something stupid – it attracts attention, which attracts attention, which attracts attention.

To address all the borderline conspiracy theories in this thread: there is no individual or group intentionally manipulating the site itself so that TikTok content appears higher. People click on them. The suggestion that KYM section off TikTok content to differentiate it from other memes is valid (although it makes no sense), but there's no secret cabal or admin agenda except for the frontpage I guess.

I was referring to the images that are placed above the "Also Trending" bar; extrapolating from that name I called them "Trending" for lack of a better term.

Unlike the "Also Trending" bar, the collection of five images, links, and titles seem to be curated in a manner more like the Front Page; that is, user engagement doesn't seem to be a factor in what's present.