Are you saving your TikToks?

Maybe you should.

Remember scrolling endlessly through hours of Vine in 2013? Endless hours of entertainment. A perfect quasi-video/meme-format had firmly arrived. (Does anyone remember squidward hitting the dab? In any event, thank god YouTube has chronicled a healthy vault of them )

Then I’m sure you remember October 2016 when Vine finally bit the dust. While Vine lived in an in-app-archive for a short time, according to Twitter (corporate owner of Vine) by 2019 “the full Vine archive is no longer available and the ability to access individual vines resides in obtaining the specific URL with unique Vine ID number spanning various characters and numbers.” In short, unless you have your own Vine IDs saved in a spreadsheet (you know i didn’t), good luck trying to Google your way to the past.

Despite TikTok’s vast and sprawling adoptions (across demographics, geographic, and mediums — yuppp, songs/movies are being inspired by TikToks), I can’t shake the wariness that it might bite the dust when the next “best” thing comes along. This does not come as a pleasant though. I couldn’t imagine experiencing a year like 2020 world without TikTok. It unofficially bridged the world in a time when the impact of physical isolation was crushing.

While I can’t say what the next platform will be (though I’ll only guarantee that one will attempt to supplant TikTok), I believe, for creators everywhere, it is deeply important to create copies of their short-form videos. Countless hours of creativity were lost in the slow demise of Vine. I think successful creators on TikTok owe it to themselves to not put their complete faith in the platform that helped build them. Instead, they should take the small necessary steps to preserve their own creative legacy.

Platforms, much like hype-beast-clout-chasers, care less for the substance and more for vibe™. TikTok, like Vine before it, like YouTube before and so on, don’t care what you’re posting but you do post. It’s a brilliant tool, and I’m not advocating that the tool is the problem. I’m contending that our trust in what platforms truly offer creators shifts when we learn what platforms are after. Platforms are for building audiences, not owning them. Platforms can scale audiences, but limit the creator’s ability to enrich them.

And as much as we want to believe ByteDance cares. They only care as much as your data exhaust allows them to monetize your fandom and activity. As soon as that activity dries up, your creations, hours of blood/sweat/tears, evaporate. Into a locked server farm never to be access by the public or worse, whipped from the face of the digital earth.

save your TikToks fam. You owe it to yourself.