This is exactly the kind of overnight success story TikTok has every incentive to manufacture (she now has 800k followers btw, in 2 weeks) Take an ordinary 16yo girl filming random makeup/life stories from her bedroom, and make millions of aspiring creators believe they could be next The more ordinary the winner looks, the more people think “fuck, I could do that too”. A 23yo Stanford dropout who builds a $100M company (or someone crossing the Atlantic swimming) doesn't make you think you could do that. A random 16yo girl making videos from her bedroom does. So from a platform perspective, there is every incentive to promote people who appear unexceptional enough to be relatable, and I think TikTok just understood that Also think platforms are increasingly realising that creators are much more monetisable than consumers. An aspiring creator can have a crazy willingness to pay if they genuinely believe they're one viral video away from changing their life. Spending $20, $50 or $200 promoting a post doesn't feel like buying advertising. It feels like buying a lottery ticket with upside of millions TikTok is slowly becoming a casino that sells you chips. Show enough people the occasional ridiculous winner, keep everyone convinced they have potential, then sell them distribution when their own content doesn't take off