Personally extremely motivating when I hit the Eric Tao audio samples that are like him absolutely laying into someone

Thanks so much for featuring our reporting!

I think that’s a fair take, but we asked users themselves about what they preferred too and landed on “power users” but we do use that term and “heavier users” interchangeably in the story itself as our neutral nomenclature.

Thanks so much, Scott, that means a lot!!

we avoided using the word "addicted" unless users themselves described themselves that way! we obviously could not establish that every one of these users had an actual addiction to the app without some sort of clinical review. "Power users" was our name for the heaviest-watch-time cohort of users.

We were sick of speculation. So thanks to the 1,100 people who shared their data with us, we were able to show how TikTok keeps users hooked on the app. Over just 5 months, users appeared to use the app more compulsively.

Stay tuned for more stories off of this incredible dataset!

TikTok is massive, fragmented and opaque: millions of Americans are pulled into a nearly infinite variety of niche corners by a recommendation system that we don’t know much about, making it difficult to understand how the constant scroll affects real people.

This story follows our unprecedented collab with our audience to build a database of 15 million TikTok videos and associated metadata from over a thousand users’ watch histories.

Read more about how my incredible colleagues and I did this here: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

After 5 months, both groups of users were spending less time on each video before swiping to the next one, an indication that scrolling on TikTok was becoming an automatic or habitual behavior.