Ditching TikTok, it’s not that easy… – konkarampelas / Pixabay
- “Your mission, if however you accept it: not to spend more than five minutes on TikTok”. No, this sentence is not taken from the last one Impossible mission, even if it does not seem (almost) implausible.
- According to a study conducted last year in the United States, United Kingdom and Spain, young people aged 4 to 15 spend an average of 80 minutes per day on the platform.
- 20 minutes has collected testimonials from its readers who share their tips and tricks to detach themselves from the social network.
It’s always the same gestures. First a scroll down. Always. A scroll, a glance at the comments. Then the entry into the spiral. The one that will turn your five-minute TikTok break into a long, endless tunnel. As long as you launch the app before bed, you can be pretty sure you’ll have bags under your eyes the next day.
All this is the fault of the Chinese giant’s algorithm, so powerful that it becomes difficult to detach from it. In just a few minutes, it scans your tastes. Do you watch cat videos more than dogs? The application will detect it. Do you have a good laugh in front of couples who prank? Prepare to discover dozens more. Do you spend more time in front of certain challenges than others? TikTok will know. By sticking to your tastes, the social network pushes the limit of personalization. Consequence: if you only see content that you like, why stop scrolling?
Twenty hours a week in front of TikTok
The addictive nature of TikTok has not escaped the notice of those who have watched the time spent on their phones explode. Audrey, a reader of 20 minutes, realized this thanks to “digital well-being”, a feature that lists the most used applications on your mobile. The young woman “hallucinated” in front of the results of her consumption: between eighteen and twenty hours of her week were devoted to TikTok! “Completely addicted”, Audrey tries “to go there less often, but it is not easy. “
Florianne, too, found that she spent “a lot of time on TikTok” thanks to the “screen time” application on her iPhone. So as not to give even more space to the social network in her days, she decided to remove the application from the main screen of her phone and to disable notifications to avoid going to live. “Doing this has helped me a lot to reduce screen time,” she concludes today.
Tips for restricting yourself
Other Internet users have noticed that the notifications are straining their hands. “We receive a lot of them when the application considers not to have been requested for a certain time,” notes Gabin who then decided to deactivate them in the settings of his phone. “So I was able to eliminate this bias that could attract me to the application,” he adds.
Laure, too, notes her overconsumption of TikTok: “an hour passes in an instant … and the time to say it, we lose our afternoon”, she writes. Even if the social network allows her to chain cooking, dancing or sports videos, the 25-year-old has decided to activate “a time limiter” to force herself to look up from her screen.
To great ills, great remedies
However, with TikTok, sometimes you have to go to great lengths when a good dose of willpower isn’t enough. This is the assessment that Ambre drew up, who tried to limit his time of use of the application before realizing that it was not enough. “I decided to delete the application despite the often appreciable content,” she says. The randomness of the videos makes Tiktok as addicting as it is time consuming. “
Virginie, for her part, launched TikTok as soon as she had five minutes free. Just about a month after installing the app, she resigned herself to saying goodbye and deleting it from her phone. “One weekend, I spent at least a good hour and a half before going to bed and it was really starting to affect my sleep,” she regrets. At D + 35, I live very well without. “We will notice all the same that she has counted the days since the beginning of her weaning.