- I stayed up all night on TikTok Live, which is sometimes known as the unregulated underbelly of the app.
- The streams I saw ran the gamut of scams, from people pretending to sleep, to content thieves, to a fake shower striptease.
At 4 a.m., I found a stream of a man assembling a house of cards. It was six rows high and the tower looked nearly complete. But instead of finishing it, he started howling at the viewers not to send him a donation — a common reverse psychology tactic to troll-bait viewers into sending him a donation. Eyeliner was smeared around his face, and he looked genuinely agonized, like he was suffering through a painful surgical operation without anesthesia.
The stream — which was actually an old video re-broadcasted in real-time by a creator who's been accused of scamming before — was one of many disquieting feeds I found while surfing all night on TikTok Live.
TikTok Live is the platform's answer to the streaming platform Twitch, a way for users to interact in real-time with their followers. It's the unfettered underbelly of the app, with a reputation for unnerving content — for example, people streaming while they sleep. TikTok Live is also how many creators make money, with fans able to donate cash gifts of up to $500 at a time. The incentive to cull donations is why its content is often both so creative and bizarre. In one stream last week, a creator appeared to be playing beer pong as he asked viewers to send him donations to try different things, like adding a cup or tossing a ball using his left hand.
To better understand the TikTok Live universe, I decided to stay up all night to see how strange and unhinged the streams would get.
I watched a mix of streams that TikTok's algorithm naturally recommended and streams on the platform's popular "Lives" tab. I also sometimes searched for content from specific popular genres (like "ASMR," "mukbang," and "gaming"), and set a 10-minute limit on every stream to experience as much content as possible. I then made sure to switch between a couple of accounts to prevent the algorithm from siloing me into one genre.
When I ended the experiment in the morning, it felt like coming up for air after being submerged in a sea of cultural sewage.
When I ended the experiment in the morning, it felt like coming up for air after being submerged in a sea of cultural sewage. I was subjected to the lowest-hanging fruit of content, from apparent scams to fantastical roleplays to clickbait titles. While I discovered some gems in the depths of night, it was mostly alarming and a little thrilling to be peering into an untethered digital void. TikTok Live really is a wasteland of weirdness.
Here's what I uncovered, logged hour-by-hour.
Midnight. A gentle beginning to the night.
The first few streams were relatively straightforward: Customers buying pearls from a pearl shop owner who was harvesting them live, a man scratching off lottery tickets and hoping to win big, and a woman who claimed she could truthfully prophesize people's futures.
The armchair fortune-teller is a pretty popular subgenre of TikTok Live. Creators often use a device known as "decision maker pendulums" with "yes," "no," and "maybe" signs to answer viewers' questions. But where professional psychics might take time to walk you through potential futures, these creators make predictions like they're speedrunning video games. They breeze through every question, even if it seems life-changingly important. Someone in the stream asked if their partner was being honest to them, and the creator nonchalantly answered "nah," with no further context nor explanation.
After that, there was a delightful "1 MINUTE TO RIZZ'' speed-dating stream, where the creator invited strangers to join the Live and paired them up for a mini date. Everyone was polite and sweet to each other, except for a German man who said something homophobic and was quickly ejected.
1 a.m. The unsettling subcultures began to reveal themselves.
It was around 1 a.m. when the content started to grow increasingly outlandish. I found multiple streams of people trying to grow a large number on the screen (one went as high as 9999999980). The creators urge viewers to donate monetary gifts to decrease or increase the number. Streamers bait viewers to donate so the number can revert to zero, or they'll use reverse psychology to cull donations if the number is getting really big. "Oh no, please don't send a gift, no, I've spent so long reaching this number!" one creator said.
This kind of large-number edging is easily one of the cheapest forms of clickbait on the platform.
I also landed on a few "DISTURB MY SLEEP" streams, a popular genre where creators claim to be sleeping and have viewers donate to them to try to wake them up. The gifts correspond to different noises, like explosive farts and piercing shrieks. When a sound plays, the person "sleeping" will often perform an affected scowl or toss their blanket in exasperation.
By far, the strangest stream in this interval was a shower striptease — or what the creator advertised as a shower striptease. (Spoiler: I didn't see anyone in the shower, although I was both alarmed and maybe a bit curious.) A wobbly camera was mounted on what appeared to be a shower wall, and water could be heard dripping limply in the background. Sometimes it shakily panned over to a rack with shampoo on it. It was like a low-budget TikTok equivalent of the movie "Skinamarink." No human ever appeared. But it seemed like the creator was trying to exploit how creepy and voyeuristic people would get. On-screen text encouraged viewers to donate a "rabbit gift" to see the creator's "kitty."
Time to cleanse the brain with some ASMR, I told myself at this point. Very few commercial TikTok influencers seemed to be streaming at night, and the biggest active creators at this time were ASMR streamers, which makes perfect sense since people often watch it to help them fall asleep.
2 a.m. - 3 a.m. Falling deeper into the belly of the beast.
2 a.m. was when the bizarre content really began to shatter my brain.
For instance, there was an entire subgenre of paranormal investigators, or people who claim to stalk spirits at night in abandoned houses and forests. A TikToker who goes by the name Howie trekked through the Pine Barrens in New Jersey with nothing but a flashlight and a burning desire to find something he called "the shadow man." To summon the creature, he began pressing against a huge tree as if pushing a gigantic cart of watermelons. It was like an elaborate form of performance art faintly redolent of the YouTuber JayStation, except without the maddening sound effects and melodramatic acting.
Next up was a stream of a man pretending to be a robot. Waving mechanically at the camera, he performed various tasks (like saying "daddy," "mommy," or slapping himself) depending on the gift size. Whoever donated the largest gift would make him perform a "big punishment." I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but the vagueness of the term felt ominous, inviting you to fill in the gap with your most alarming imaginations. Commenters accused the stream of being a scam and warned newcomers that he wasn't actually a real robot. (Roleplaying seemed to be a mainstay of late-night streaming. On the "Lives" tab, there were popular streams of creators dressed up as an alien and a gorilla.)
The algorithm provided a reprieve from the craziness around 3 a.m.: a feed of cute raccoons munching food on someone's porch. The camera was stable; the atmosphere was peaceful. You could hear trees softly rustling and the gentle buzz of insects. I felt refreshed.
Whoever donated the largest gift would make him perform a 'big punishment.' I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but the vagueness of the term felt ominous.
Recommended content started to flood in from countries around the world where it was already daytime. There was a stream by an Indonesian man with over 20,000 followers who billed himself as the number one ambassador for aloe vera — as if to prove it, he began eating the plant. I then got dropped into a videocast of a bustling street in Shibuya, Tokyo, run by a news organization with over 3.5 million followers. The camera was pointed at an intersection and never moved.
The international content warped my sense of time, as clips flicked between sunny streets and then across dark, shadowy rooms. The immersive nature of TikTok's algorithm gave everything a timeless, placeless feeling. I never knew what type of stream to expect next, as the content and language changed. Throughout the night, I kept running into the same fake-shower and fake-sleep streamers. Thinking I may have broken my For You page algorithm, I briefly paused to make some tomato soup.
4 a.m. - end. Dazed and disoriented in the void of content.
After 4 a.m., when the lack of sleep really began creeping on me, the content started to blur together into a cacophony of conning and visual gibberish.
I found a creator streaming an old MrBeast "Among Us" gameplay video and pretending it was live. There was a man with a human-sized phone who kept saying "welcome to our kingdom" and searching for the TikTok profiles of users who donated to him. One stream featured a baby with a disproportionately large head. One of the final Lives I watched was a "DISTURB MY JOB" stream, a sibling genre to the fake-sleep streamers. In these videos, the TikToker sits before a screen and feigns to be working. This man had perhaps the most pain-stricken look I've ever seen. He honestly deserved an Oscar.
The saddest part was that only ten people were watching. Even the most peculiar clickbait can lose its luster.
What I learned (a lot) and what I lost (my sanity) along the way.
A striking difference between Twitch and TikTok Live is that there are still big influencers on Twitch streaming in the wee hours. I saw multiple popular gaming streamers with tens of thousands of viewers throughout the experiment. Twitch star Kai Cenat maintained around 100,000 concurrent viewers during a sub-athon that night. But on TikTok, the largest audiences were barely over 10,000 at a time, and they were mostly random accounts.
The decentralized structure of TikTok and its chaotic algorithm incentivizes people to make clickbait to get noticed. Rather than gradually building up a fanbase like on Twitch, TikTok's vortex of content means live-streaming creators might have to do whatever it takes to hook viewers and coax donations. It's one of the darker manifestations of the gig economy to date. Sustaining careers for creators is a TikTok-wide problem, and it isn't the creators' fault they're pushed to such extremes.
Rather than gradually building up a fanbase like on Twitch, TikTok's vortex of content means live-streaming creators might have to do whatever it takes to hook viewers and coax donations.
TikTok could make changes to help fix this, like stripping down the excess gift options and focusing more on monthly channel subscriptions. This would encourage streamers to establish communities with loyal fans rather than deploying cheap tactics to bamboozle gifts. TikTok could also create a more easily searchable "Lives" hub, with recommendations for large streamers to check out. And the platform could enforce its rules better, like its policy that prohibits "frauds and scams" (as well as specific content areas like gambling, which is another popular TikTok Live subgenre). I asked TikTok about this. In an email statement I received on Tuesday, the company said it is actively "identifying and removing" content that violates its guidelines.
"Our community expects an authentic experience and we work hard to maintain that by identifying and removing behavior that violates our Community Guidelines, including fraud and impersonation," a spokesperson said. "We continue to invest in strengthening our detection and prevention mechanisms to minimize the potential for this behavior to flourish on our platform."
Even though some of the content was unsettling, the experience was ultimately fascinating and informative. In an era of personalized algorithms, it's often difficult to escape your internet bubble and discover how vast and diverse the rest of the online-scape can be. Forest spirit-hunters? An aloe vera king? Rush hour in Shibuya? I wouldn't have stumbled on any of these if it wasn't for TikTok Live. It may have felt like a maelstrom of insipid content at the moment, but the experiment was worth it for the stories.