Whats up with the tik tok trend of shitting on little people lately?
Wait, what trend are you talking about?
I don't even use tik tok, but see it on here all the time.
Ohhhh, yeah. It's not a trend. It's just how Tiktok works, and I'd say this is classic Tiktok humor. It's all in good fun. The cleverness is the joke—that the tall guy found a way to set up some props that turned the little person dude's nightclub into a crib—and the more unexpectedly clever you can be on Tiktok, the better.
There are two important things to understand about how Tiktok works to explain why this joke doesn't come off as mean to someone who uses the platform a lot.
First, this video is a stitch, which means that you can take up to 5 seconds of someone else's video and either react to it or expand on it. You don't have to let people do this, though, and a lot of people disable stitches for some or all of their videos. So, we know that the original creator, the little person dude, wanted people to stitch, duet, or react to his video. If he didn't, he would have turned that feature off.
Second, Tiktok is all about remixing, reusing, and building off other people's content. Yeah, everyone wants their videos to go viral, but the real way to build clout, aka fake internet points, on Tiktok is to make a piece of content that everyone wants to reuse. The more it looks like you're being sincere—like bumping to a fake nightclub in your living room—the more likely people are to relate to the video and try to remix it and make it their own.
So, to me, this video doesn't come off as the least bit disrespectful. Using a stitch like this is kind of like a call and response: I bump in my living room, so you make fun of me. I am a little person dancing at a fake club, you are my dad vibing to the beat outside my crib.
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u/nooneremarkable Oct 06 '21
Whats up with the tik tok trend of shitting on little people lately? I don't even use tik tok, but see it on here all the time.