'TikTok' goes the Clockwork Orange

Almost exactly two months since my last Substack confession - the one about the Japanese take on death and magic realism. Rest assured I’m on a lighter topic today and my apologies for taking some time off to celebrate birthdays and Christmas.

In 2025 it was time for me to get rid of Facebook though this means I have less of a feel for what my cousins are up to and what their kids do. Unfortunate but it was time, I think. Did I leave the entire Meta universe? Nah, not really. Still hanging in there with WhatsApp - essentially a messaging app and not a social media app for me - and Instagram for following other bad photographers and other people who like railways and trains. And there really wasn’t any way I could possibly stay on X and even in the smallest way contribute content or give it credibility or endorsement. Now, this was tricky for the alternatives weren’t fantastic. Threads works like Instagram transposed and leaning a bit more towards text than videos. Minimal benefit I thought. Mastodon has more going for it but it is also segmented and clunky. I think that Bluesky is the closest one gets to a legacy Twitter clone and it does this very well indeed. Also, science stuff is increasingly moving from the Elonsphere to somewhere more appreciative of fact over narrative. There is no paid verification but if you have your own website or domain you can link your handle to that and say boo-hoo to those who simply want to be you. Plenty of those out there. Right? Please don’t say no.

If you do decide to try Bluesky then here’s a starter pack of accounts you might like

A few years ago I briefly checked out Tiktok and found it absolutely awful. It would keep throwing idiotic memes and dances at me and it seemed to take no interest in whether I dismissed stuff or liked it. On day three it still had not learned a thing so I decided that the algorithm wasn’t much good and got rid of it. Incidentally I would not keep it on my phone same as I never had Facebook on the phone. Consigned to an old tablet I don’t use for other stuff, sandboxed, sanitized, unloved.

Man has it changed. It still lives on an old tablet that doesn’t have much else but now it provides me with interesting, diverse, well crafted short videos on stuff that interests me and it seems to slightly improve further with use. Is that your experience too? Talking me through castles, books, flash photography settings, linguistics, cryptic crosswords, cooking hacks and Eurotok as if there was no tomorrow. I am particularly drawn to account with fewer than a couple of hundred subscribers. Feel like I am distributing hope and appreciation. That’s new. The old Tiktok didn’t do that. What I did right this time was to do a lot of words searches for topics that interest me somewhat and after half an hour or so the good stuff began popping up. Also the fake followers - mixed feelings that the fake Amy Macdonald decided to be my friend but no skin off my nose really. The whole thing does very much what Youtube does so you may not be missing much but it is a little snappier and I suppose the algorithm has become quite good and useful. Check it out. You’ll need to feed it a phone number or something but you needn’t keep it on the phone, I wouldn’t.

Not true any longer. LinkedIn has become a very useful place for work related discussions including medical stuff and discussion of scientific papers. A good place to get things to a professional audience but not ideal for idle musings or screaming at the world. You might get a job that way but probably not one you’d want.

If I knew the answer to that I would not be bothering with a day job or free thought on Substack would I? Didn’t your mother tell you not to take financial advice from some random dude on the internet? No? Well then, here goes: Never put funds into the stock market, currency or crypto unless you can afford to lose it. The best way to end up with a small fortune is to start with a large one like the 45th & 47th President of the United States. Damn, I wasn’t going to mention him. I wanted to guide you gently into this exciting new year and now I’ve blown it. Okay, if you really want to hear what I think about the share market and crypto here we go.

If you bought crypto a long time ago and didn’t pay a fortune then probably keep it and see what happens. I would not buy crypto now, the prices are so high that the bubble may well burst and I think the long term trend will be speedily downwards but it is hard to say when. As for the share market I suspect that what 45/47 Potus is doing at the moment is a poop and scoop exercise, creating pressure on Canadian, Mexican and European shares that can then be bought and sold later once the pressure is deliberately released. Poop and scoop followed by pump and dump. You can hear I’m not a financial advisor, just some random guy on the internet who suspects that someone in the White House has a plan after all. Not one we like much but a plan after all.

giving Tiktok a second chance, consider whether shares in Europe, Canada and Mexico may be on sale right now and a better buy long term than crypto, getting rid of your X and FB accounts, trying out Bluesky if you haven’t already and preserving mental energy by setting aside ten minutes over lunch for doom scrolling and then abstain from looking for misery for the rest of the day.