Explaining the Best and Weirdest TikTok Trends

TikTok is filled with wonders. It’s SO weird. It can make you feel like the algorithm is telling you something you don’t even realize about yourself….or it serve you a whole bunch of cyst draining videos. In order to answer your questions about WTF is happening in your feed, I knew I needed a weird internet aficionado who also understands the way our tech platforms actually work. I needed Katie Notopoulos. Join us as we talk about the parallel dimension that is TikTok Live, the difference between Reels and TikTok content, those bizarre “bugs all over me” videos, nail tapping ASMR, the clean girl aesthetic, and SO MUCH MORE.

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Show Notes:

• Read all of Katie’s great and weird reporting over at Business Insider

• Follow Katie’s weird reels on Instagram

• Some Chainsaw Testing

• CLEAN GIRL AESTHETIC

• MORE CLEAN GIRL

• SICK ROPE CUTTING

• The vaguely Patrick Bateman ASMR clean living guy on Instagram

• A classic in the hoof cleaning genre

• My favorite sheep herding dog guy

• One of the fake bug videos (I PROMISE IT’S FAKE)

We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

• Why is Paul Mescal so hot

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

For today’s discussion: What’s good and weird in your TikTok feed right now? What do you see as the difference between Reels and TikToks?

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