TikTok, as well as many other Social Platforms became heavily extortionist upon content creators in the last 3 years... Because they created advertising capability, which is essential to build an audience within their closed walls, they no longer had any incentive to permit organic growth, as ad revenue earns them Billions of dollars. There is no way to verify the return on investment for buying ads on these platforms, the majority of ad views could well be bot and inauthentic accounts, so the value of spending heavily on ads is also a farce.
These apps have turned into casinos, where only the house really wins, and creators and businesses only find out after they've spent far too much on closed-platform advertising with shrinking sales, as less viable customers log in because they find a lack of opportunity and entertainment due to all the ads now displayed. Even the influence r economy is drying up, as viewers consider influencers inauthentic when they shill consumer products.
TikTok has turned into television, where there are little choices, little relevance to the vast audience of viewers, and tons of commercials. TikTok has been dying for a while now, just like FaceBook, and Twitter. People can do without it, though it may be painful at first, most of the earnings on TikTok were for the company on ad revenue, not for businesses and creators, and that is evidenced by declining markets and higher unemployment filings over time. A lot of the creators touting massive earnings is the result of the "fake it till you make it" ethos pushed by Social Media since it's inception.
Many of the people evangelizing platforms now are paid actors and sponsored under the table.... There is little means to detect when it's happening because the algorithms appear to be mysterious, but the primary "algorithm" running on most of these platforms now is based on who pays the most money to be seen.
It will be interesting to see what comes next, but users are beyond worn out on these casino ad-based social media business models, as evidenced on Meta Threads (a non-ad-based) platform, and on black-hat hacker forums, many complain about how platforms no longer work properly, and how they no longer even log in to them. The social media platforms may say otherwise, but we are experiencing a conscious shift away from mega-platforms back to smaller message boards and individual websites, which may be a good thing, let's hope the siege on consciousness of social media is in it's last laps, purely to end repetitive ads, gimmicky music clips, success tips, lack of pay for work, and influencer wealth lies... And to also cull all the political, cultural, and medical disinformation at least.