👀 A new platform to crowdsource most viewed TikToks

Also inside #9: 🧶 phone free knitting 🖊️ prose on GIFs 🔮 mystery link

For a while now, I’ve been obsessed with a simple problem, which I outlined in my piece Missing: billions of views: we have no idea what the most viewed content on social media is.

We can get a sense of maybe the top ten or twenty posts of all time — platforms like TikTok reveal these periodically to the media and frankly, when they’re as viral as that, they’re not hard to find. But seeing everything above e.g. 10 million views? Above 1 million views? Nope. Seeing the most viral videos by day or week, to understand what’s trending — maybe by country too? Hell no.

I can say that with some confidence because I’ve spent quite a while staring into this insane data void, including setting myself a challenge last year of finding the most viewed content on social media.

Today, I’m excited to take a step forward in that challenge by soft-launching PikTop: a new platform to crowdsource the most viewed TikToks.

PikTop is as simple as the problem it’s trying to solve: it’s a big Leaderboard of the most viewed TikToks, which you can filter by country and time. Top for Indonesia in April, for instance, or the US last year. PikTop is made for two types of users: casual viewers, and players.

Casual viewers simply visit the site to browse the Leaderboard. The Leaderboard is a public resource, useful not just for researchers or non-TikTok users who are curious about the most viral content on TikTok in a given place and time, but also for TikTok users who feel stuck in the silo of their For You Page — the default TikTok feed, which shows you posts that are highly tailored to your interests — and want to get a sense of what’s trending app-wide.

Then we have players, the true heroes of PikTop, volunteering their time so the world can finally see the biggest outputs of the TikTok algorithm. Maybe they do it because they like the thrill of discovery, or because they see their favourite influencer left off the Leaderboard. Players create an account, submit links to TikTok videos (currently through the site, soon through sharing direct to Discord from TikTok), and win points and glory for hunting down viral videos — including the satisfaction of seeing videos with millions of views permanently ‘claimed’ as found by them.

Inspired by similar features on GitHub and Reddit, players can also win badges for: the first video they find from each country, finding videos above certain view thresholds (e.g. 100m), finding videos with animals in them, and more. Here’s my PikTop profile, which I can confidently say is the most highly-decorated on the platform as of today:

You’ll see I’ve earned 6,006 viewpoints — you get 1 viewpoint for every million views you find. (To those asking if I had an unfair advantage when I hunted down the top TikToks of all time and claimed their billions of views for myself, I say: no comment.)

Behind the cute badges and the gamification, PikTop has three goals:

First, to be the world’s best guess of the most viewed videos on TikTok. Crowdsourcing the videos won’t be perfect — there’ll be gaps. But I hope PikTop will create the best picture possible of what’s viral on TikTok, for anyone who doesn’t work at ByteDance or can’t pay thousands of dollars to use social monitoring tools like Brandwatch.

Second, to make the rather dry concept of ‘platform transparency’ fun. There’s a ton of amazing work by civil society organizations to demand access to data from big tech folks like TikTok, Meta and Alphabet, particularly in the EU (I’m involved in some of it). But something that’s missing is a fun way to show people what platform transparency should look like, how it can benefit them, and why it matters.

Third, to embarrass TikTok into giving us the data themselves. I hope that PikTop will highlight the absurdity of how we lack even some of the most basic data about what content exists on social media platforms, especially at a time when billions turn to them not just for entertainment but to understand the world, politics, current affairs.

As I’ve written before, there’s endless talk about banning TikTok — how about we start by understanding what’s actually on it!

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You can sign up to PikTop here (because it’s in alpha, there will be bugs). I’d love thoughts or feedback — leave a comment or reply to this email.

PikTop is only possible because of the support of Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab, where I was previously a fellow (big thanks to Meg Marco and Zoe Robert in particular), the Mozilla Foundation, where I’m a senior fellow, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, where I’m a fellow.

Next steps are to do a wider launch, test the product with some initial players, and do some of my own work to populate the Leaderboard so it becomes more useful to casual viewers.

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🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Phone Free Bitch & Stitch — Logging Off Club, 26th April, London

Nice phone free event for any folks in London. Also check out The Offline Club, which has chapters in various (mostly European) cities, and was covered by Dazed here. There are a bunch of movements like these around the world (e.g. Phone Smart) — I’ll take a deeper look in a future newsletter.

A Shimmering — The HTML Review

The HTML Review is a yearly journal featuring literature that uses the magic of good old-fashioned websites as its medium:

I loved A Shimmering, from the most recent issue. There’s nothing particularly complicated about it, but something about the blend of GIFs and prose elevates the experience.

And then there’s the wonderful ASCII Bedroom Archive, from the same issue. I almost feel like these pieces should be exhibited in a gallery, so that they’ll be given the full attention they deserve — away from the distractions of someone’s phone or computer. But hey, I guess that’s part of the package when HTML is your medium.

The HTML Review’s about page is a great place to find other things that might make you feel excited about the internet again.

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

Brand new, hopefully self-explanatory feature this week:

Also, having a great time collaborating with reader Nitya Kuthiala on a new project — hopefully more on that in the next couple of weeks!

If there’s something in the neighborhood of fun and tech that you think should exist in the world — and yes, on Attention in particular — hit reply! After that, ideally, type some words and send them to me.