Have you ever failed to find a certain TikTok clip amid the heaps you already created or encountered? You know how sometimes scrolling through your ‘For You’ Feed makes you come across a random funny meme or a surprising video that later sticks to your head and you want to go back to it later only to find out that you can’t, for some reason, find it anymore?
It happens and it can be very frustrating. Fortunately, TikTok’s aware and is coming up with a solution.
TikTok Archiving Service
For initial context, check out this Tweet by app researcher Hammod Oh. It seems that TikTok is currently testing a new ‘Watch History’ option to help users track down these ‘highly elusive’ clips.
For what it’s worth, this could be a lifesaver, especially in instances where you want to share a video that you found absolutely enjoyable with friends and family. In many ways, such a feature helps save you a ton of time from scrolling through random videos hoping to find that one clip that keeps replaying in your head.
For any platform that has to do with actual videos (not just GIFs), having a watch history is sort of mandatory, just take a look at YouTube. Keeping track of what you’ve watched helps you to also monitor both the trends that have passed, as well as the ones currently gaining traction. Also, once you have millions of videos circulating on a network, it really pays to have some way to keep tabs on whatever things you’ve watched.
On the topic of sharing humorous vids, we all know that making people wait to see something funny reduces the humor value by a factor of 5 for every minute that they’re stuck waiting. Going beyond comedic bits, the same essentially applies to any content – so long as people have to wait more than a certain time to see specific content, the appeal of said content will go down. The fact that attention spans are decreasing doesn’t help this one bit.
TikTok hasn’t dropped official details about a rollout or even testing just yet, but it did provide TechCrunch with this statement:
“We’re always thinking about new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the TikTok experience.”
The Wrap
To note, there are alternative methods to track down previously watched videos on TikTok, but none are quite as simple as this. What we can derive from this development is that ‘history’ does come in very handy, especially if you consider the value of immediacy when sharing content with connections. Stay tuned for updates.
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