The age of social media has been around for well over a decade now and generations of people do not know a world where things like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are not a thing. This is unimaginable to those of us who grew up or were growing up during the time in which the internet was not as widely present or used. Back in the day, the world wide web was mostly used for emails, browsing, and a little bit of online gaming and content downloads. Chat rooms were the only thing similar to the type of social interactions we have to today.
Fast forward to the 2010s and now 2024s, and there are dozens of services and platforms that could be described as social media. While the old school players mentioned above still rule, the newcomers to the game have taken the online world by storm and caused a shift. Out of all of them, TikTok is the undisputed leader among the new wave of social media. It is so popular that it is quickly overtaking all of its competitors with the numbers of daily users, accounts, and the amount of content everyone puts out.
You probably have a TikTok account already so there is a good chance that you know a lot about it. Despite this, there is always new things that can be learned and in this article we will do exactly that. If you wanted to know more about the platform, particularly the hidden features and perhaps some tricks that you are not using, you came to the right place. Read on to find out more.
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Downloading Videos
TikTok is a video sharing platform first and everything else second. No matter what you want to achieve with it you must first upload and share video content for your followers and the world to see. Right now, thousands of videos are being uploaded every second and people are constantly finding many that they love. Accessing them whenever you want is not always possible as often times the user will delete it or you will somehow lose track of it. To ensure that you have the video you like, the best thing would be to download it. However, you cannot download somebody else’s video directly on TikTok. To do that, you will need a service like qload.info where you can copy a link to the desired video and download it to your device. Make sure to check it out if you have a video or two you want for your collection.
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Finding Stitches
If you want to find the best content in the entire app, you need to start using stitches more. Moreover, if you want to look for something you thought of or recall a video from memory, your best bet would be to type it in the search bar. Scrolling until you find more relatable content can be time consuming and the algorithm may not award you with exactly what you want every time. In order to find stitches from a user you have in mind, type in #stitch @(their username). By doing this you will get better and narrower results on the exact thing you wanted to find. Try it out and see for yourself!
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Auto Captions Are Helpful
TikTok is famous for its videos and sounds, but these alone are often not enough for the users to fully understand and get the jokes. This becomes even worse when the content is educational or in some way helpful. If you cannot understand the people of if spoken audio is generally not enough to keep your attention, you can always turn on auto captions for instant subtitles. The feature is great when you do not have your headphones and need to keep it quiet too. A lot of TikTokers include their own subtitles, but many of them lack the necessary subtitles for the full effect particularly when the creators are talking in accents unfamiliar to you. Speaking quickly, mumbling, or rapping is also problematic for certain individuals, so make sure to navigate to the captions option in the settings and turn them on.
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The Pause Trend
Like any social media in existence, TikTok has a lot of challenges and trends. One of the more famous ones is called the pause trend where the user takes very short videos in succession and pauses between them at the right moment. By doing this, videos get secret parts that you have to pause on in order to understand. This is too much work for certain users so they came up with a great solution. You can use stitches while sharing the video and then scroll to the part of the video you want appears. If the user disabled the stitch feature, screen record the video and then pause it from your gallery.
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Not Interested
For Your Page is one of the best parts of the app, but only if it contains the content that you actually like. For the first few weeks or months of using the app, you will get all sorts of different content only some of which you will actually care about. To tailor the types of videos you like and have the algorithm serve you what you are interested in the most, long-press the stuff you do not like and choose the “Not Interested” button. If you do it enough times, the algorithm will stop giving you that type of content on your home page and there will be room for more things you enjoy.
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Seeing Hidden Text
Some videos have hidden text on them that are cleverly placed where they are hard to read. If it is too far on the right, the profile pic will block it. If it is too far to the bottom, the words will block the caption, and so on and so forth. In case you ever want to read everything there is to read on a video, you should just long-press the screen and slide the pop-up down, all in one motion. The video appears darker that way, but you will at least be able to see the entire text without anything in the way.