My general view on TikTok is: why would I even remotely want to use something that's specifically designed to exploit me and manipulate me? The tiny shred of value I might experience (in the form of an occasional interesting video) is a side-effect of the service, and if they could get their value out of me and give me literally nothing at all, they would. This same perspective applies to all the centralized "social media" services out there today. None of them exist to make society better or improve the lives of anyone in any meaningful way (outside of enriching the executives and investors running them).

To be honest, it's pretty easy to surface useful content on TT. Its algorithm is far more responsive to, say, immediate skips and likes/follows than Ig or FB.

I have found it a lot easier to find a diversity of opinions from a more diverse group of folks there. Specifically, I have been really interested in what leftist/liberal bipoc folks think about current events, and it's very easy to get that content. And it's easy enough to flip quickly past hoteps and maga black men, who I don't usually care about hearing from. The disussions between say, black anarchists, pro-Harris DNC folks, and afropessimists have been very enlightening, personally.

Those aren't conversations I have been able to find on, say, Ig.

The main thing is that it pays a lot of attention to what you actually stop and watch, so if you let your attention wander you might end up watching folks rebuild industrial electric motors or paint warhammer minis.

Honestly, I think it's a lot less mind numbing than the last bits of broadcast TV or feature films folks have inflicted on me, regardless of folks enjoying their ability to hate on it.

Why? Just leave it be, and your life will be just as rich if not richer.

I hear a lot of people be incredibly critical of TikTok, while being active consumers of Facebook/Instagram/X/etc. I've found the content on TikTok to be much better curated to what I actually like, with just enough (i.e., very little!) other content sprinkled in occasionally.

I asked someone a similar question to you a year ago and they told me something like "just spend 15 minutes with it. Aggressively swipe past things you aren't enjoying, like the the things you like. Search for something you are interested in too and like anything you like there". My feed is currently entirely basketball coaching tips for kids, cooking & recipes, stand up comedy, basic DIY, fitness/running tips, local restaurant recommendations, and sports highlights.

We don't have TikTok here (India), but I find YouTube shorts pretty useful. My feed is a mix of Action Labs shorts, Omar Agamy news, ZTT PC stuff, psychology, videos about animals (pet, domestic, wild), etc. I don't know what your standard for meaningful is, but the shorts are at least as useful as long form videos to me, if not more.

An important bit of context is that I prefer to get detailed information through text, research, sometimes podcasts, but rarely ever videos. The shorts serve as one low effort way (among others) for me to surface new potentially interesting things, to follow up on to the degree I find useful or interesting.

There is no meaningful way to use it.

Closed-source, very-limited-API platforms like Tik Tok do not actually let you "play with the thing". What I imagine you would be interested in is a client which, say, gets the text version of a large number of short videos, filters those texts based on criteria you have defined and meta-data from TikTok (time, number of views, some proxies for a 'quality' measure) and serves you up with the results in a textual form, or perhaps a page with titles/summaries and links to the text and the video.

I'm not sure that's worth it but I'm willing to be this is not possible to achieve.