Emma Ford / The Mossy Log
Those of us teetering on the brink of that trial known as “real adulthood” know better than anyone the powerful force that is nostalgia. In the course of seeking out surges of happiness and comfort in uncertain and anxiety-producing times, we watch old movies, buy merch and toys of our favorite childhood characters, speak fondly of halcyon days of yore when the public library and Cartoon Network and playgrounds filled our days.
But the nostalgia I want to discuss is not that of our childhoods (at least not by some standards) but the nostalgia of our adolescence. Unlike past generations who outgrew toys and opted for sports, clubs or mild-to-moderate delinquency, we were presented with a new frontier to develop on — the microchipped, micro-transactional world of Silicon Valley’s internet.
Whether we were tightly constrained with a parental-locked phone and a Pinterest account being our only social media outlet (as far as our parents knew, that is. Even in our time the private Instagram or secret Snapchat account had quite a bit of popularity) or we were given free reign of the Web, we all started somewhere. We registered for an email address and watched our first YouTube video; Gangnam Style, the Harlem Shake or maybe a YouTube Rewind special that cataloged them all at the end of each year. The last one of those was made six years ago.
And the Internet of our younger days looked very different than it does now. Before Facebook was Meta, it was also a desirable platform for young people (although it was declining in popularity even then, with an almost nonexistent youth user base today). TikTok was nowhere on the horizon, but we had Vine. Short-form YouTube comedy content made us laugh 15 minutes at a time — remember iiSuperwomanii, now late-night host Lily Singh, or Felix Kjellberg, who still goes by PewDiePie even though Google autocompletes searches for the handle with “racist,” “antisemitic” and “cancelled” — as opposed to the multi-hour video essays that wrack up millions of views in the background of crocheting, studying and sleeping young adults’ lives.
When Internet users mourn a dead platform (seriously, RIP Vine) or retired creator (I still have friends who fondly remember and dearly miss Jenna Marbles), it is hardly different from mourning a canceled TV show. That which was of our younger years and is not with our current years is understandable to miss.
See, the more interesting and hard-to-explain nostalgia is not aimed at what is no longer with us — it is aimed at what is not as it used to be.
The TikTok ban threatened short-form video content enjoyers and creators alike with the loss (for U.S. markets) of access to a platform with 1.56 billion users, 36% of which are between the ages of 18 and 24. In response, many creators posted simple, poignant videos bidding goodbye to their audiences and advertising their presence on other sites. They celebrated the impending end of the platform by remembering what it had brought to their lives creatively and socially.
Others, however, exercised a little more creativity, or at least a little more effort. They brought back the, at that time, three-and-a-half-year-old trend that recreated Adult Swim bumpers from the 1990s and early 2000s. They used these short and often powerful imitations of commercials to say what they thought was a final goodbye to TikTok, referencing not the nostalgia of past decades but the nostalgia many users expressed feeling for “the better times” of TikTok content from the summer of 2021. I felt my heartstrings tug watching these if I am honest — I last saw this trend the summer before I started college. I graduate in May.
The ever-increasing rate of cycles of nostalgia means that internet users fondly recall trends and events from only a few years ago like old friends. This iteration of the “[AS] trend” was not aimed at recapturing the 1990s, but a far more recent period that users still thought of through the same golden lens as they might their favorite day in kindergarten. And while on the surface that may seem charming, I do not believe this phenomenon is totally innocent.
Science fiction author and tech writer Cory Doctorow first coined the term “enshittification” in 2022 to describe a previously-observed decline in the quality of online sites and services including Airbnb, Amazon, Google and our beloved TikTok.
At first, sites are good for their users. Then, when the users are reliant on the site in some way, sites lower user quality in favor of catering toward profits, ripping off their business partners to keep those profits for themselves. Through expanding or raising subscription costs, paywalling content or services or choking the site with advertisements, once-user-friendly and low-cost or free services become at best annoying. At worst, they become unusable.
For instance, more often than not as I researched this article, the news sites and blogs I clicked on were so choked with advertisements and pop-ups they took several minutes to load and reload before I could read the text. Which, for the record, was often spaced out one paragraph at a time between flashing ad space. Or they would be behind a “limited-time, low offer” of monthly and yearly subscription costs; ironically, I could not access multiple articles whose headlines promised to talk about the commercialization of the once-free Internet due to these “features” blocking my way.
TikTok, which still costs no money to use, has brought advertising to its platform not only through its TikTok Shop (which has proven tough for users to block from algorithms and can be easily accidentally swiped to while scrolling) but a marked increase in sponsored content between free, user-made videos.
This approach has a simple motive: the increase of profits. TikTok Shop has represented a significant avenue of financial growth for its parent company ByteDance with 30% of users self-reporting purchasing directly on the app. TikTok’s advertising revenue rose over 38% from 2023 to 2024 to total $10.42 billion (predicted to rise to over $15 billion by 2026). Regardless of users’ feelings, the dollar incentive to decrease a platform’s usability through stifling content and prioritizing commerce services is strong for ByteDance.
Modern estimates describe the average U.S. consumer as seeing between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements daily, attributed largely to advertising techniques and algorithms driven by Google and Meta. As this number has rapidly grown, the nostalgia for a time before rampant advertising is nostalgia for only a few years ago, as TikTok Shop only came on the scene in November 2023 and anecdotal user reports of sponsored content have steadily increased over the past three years. Opinion pieces and tweets alike bemoan the constant barrage of “SponCon.”
While it can be hard to make a claim of “what the Internet is feeling,” the “[AS] trend” can be interpreted as an implicit response to the marked increase of advertisement presence online in the last few years. Users may or may not have watched Adult Swim in the years of its peak popularity — many of those 18-24 year olds were too young to have done so. But what they do remember is an Internet, not so long ago, where you may have seen a sponsored trailer or unskippable YouTube ad, but did not feel that its presence was greater than the content you had actually sought out.
After all, the [AS] trend and others like it were not started by companies and were interspersed with fewer ads. To swipe from one video to another did not risk opening an online marketplace full of hard-to-close pop-ups and cheap products that rival Temu in quality, and perhaps surpass it in the stifling quantity that defines online budget commerce. The days of that trend were a different Internet, one that certainly considered profit and angered users, but was perhaps less outwardly hostile to those that populated its platforms.
As cycles of movement on the Internet grow ever faster, the mourning of TikTok shows that users no longer look at days long gone as the days when everything was different. They look merely to yesterday. And when they look to tomorrow, they see yet another, worse version of something they once loved.
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