Is TikTok playing you (and your kids) like a piano?

TikTok’s own highly protected data shows it takes just 260 videos, about 35 minutes, to form a usage habit. The Washington Post confirmed it with 15 million swipes.

TikTok is not supplying what you like. It is training you

Quick confession: I have NEVER used TikTok. I’ve literally only been shown a couple of ridiculous things by my kids. And once I had them pull up a Doctor Karl post with over three million views.

Outside of that, I’ve never experienced Italian brain rot, I’m non-skibidi. It really is just 6-7* as far as I’m concerned.

But I do know it is remarkably addictive.

A recent Washington Post article explored this ‘stickiness’ with some fascinating, maybe alarming, results.

Who controls your thumb? Spoiler alert … not you!

Most people believe TikTok works by finding out what they like. But the Post’s experiment suggests something more unsettling.

That TikTok teaches its users what to want.

And it doesn’t take months, just minutes.

Internal TikTok documents released in a multistate lawsuit state it clearly: it can take as little as 260 videos, spanning just over half an hour, to form a usage habit.

This is well beyond the personalisation of a streaming service knowing what to suggest you watch.

It’s behavioural capture at sonic speed.

Doing the ByteDance dance

TikTok’s owner ByteDance keeps usage data notoriously hidden. So the Post built its own.

It recruited 1,100 volunteer users and collected their full watch histories over 6 months. An incredible 15 million videos. That’s a lot of gym-bro smoothie hacks and tiny dogs in handbags!

Then they ran behavioural analyses to see when activity became habit and then how strong the habit became.

The results were stark. Even light users fell into compulsive swiping patterns over time, reopening the app “even when they said they didn’t want to.”

“I know I should stop scrolling and get work done or go to sleep, but it’s so hard to stop, knowing the next swipe might bring me to a truly interesting video.” Jon Freilich 51 year old TikTok user

The science of stickiness

At its core, TikTok’s feed is powered by relentless reinforcement learning. The same neural network logic that teaches AI to play chess or drive cars.

Every swipe, pause, or even a blink-long hesitation sends feedback to the algorithm’s reward system.

TikTok optimises your feed by mapping millions of these “micro-signals”; how long you watch, what you ignore, even how long it takes you to decide ‘yeah, nah, this sucks’.

And, crucially, it occasionally injects random or unfamiliar videos you haven’t shown an interest in, probing for new tastes to keep the feed from turning stale.

This “novelty engine” is part of the algorithm’s magic, retraining your brain’s reward circuitry (think dopamine release) much like a casino slot machine with enough unpredictability thrown in to keep you coming back for more.

This isn’t idle distraction. It’s AI guided reinforcement learning. You hesitate, even briefly? TikTok registers a “micro-signal” and retunes the feed.

Your attention becomes the calibration knob.

“It’s displacing the time that we could otherwise spend with friends, family and neighbors, and doing other more helpful and beneficial activities,” Prof Meredith David, Baylor University

Addiction … A-flick-tion

After five months, Post researchers found both heavy users and casuals showed classic signs of compulsion.

They repeatedly felt the urge to open the app despite believing it was harmful in the long term.

They all tended to swipe forward faster, like a poker player ‘on tilt’.

Casual users were viewing for twice as long as when the experiment started, now over an hour. Heavy users stayed at 4 hours plus!

That’s textbook dependency. But unlike alcohol or gambling, this addiction fits in your pocket and showers you with catchy K-Pop.

I’d love to know if you or anyone you know is genuinely hooked on TikTok. Leave your thoughts as a comment.

“Oh God, how was I on here for 30 minutes straight?... Because the videos are like 30 seconds, they’re a minute, and you just don’t realise because there’s that never-ending scrolling.” Samantha Margeson, 43

Chin up buddy you never stood a chance

Feeling silly - even a little bit dirty - that you just blew 45 minutes in bed at night time where you could have been sleeping? Or doing the other things you used to do in bed, at night time!

Don’t beat yourself up. This is not your weak will succumbing to catnip. It’s your standard sized human brain up against industrialised, hard-core, addiction-pushing mathematics. 

TikTok isn’t recommending content. It’s orchestrating your response reflex.

The first defence is probably not cold-turkey quitting.

More likely it is noticing the pull.

Maybe once you can see the hook, you can choose when to bite.

Setting total usage limits, requesting “take a break’ messages, even, God forbid, deleting it off your phone and only using the platform on desktop where there is more friction in the experience?

Good luck!

Yours in the joy of reading an old fashioned paper book or going for a run,

Adam S

*Ok boomer, enough of the cringe young people talk