For reasons unbeknownst to users, the ability to organize your favorite videos (into what TikTok calls “Collections”) is available to some, was taken away from others, and for the rest of us, the “Collections” feature simply never existed. TikTok users have been lamenting over the loss of – or the inability to – organize their favorite videos for months, and we all want the ability to put our favorite videos where they belong.
There is a whole lot to love about TikTok – you can discover new music, watch dogs do “barkour,” learn hand signals to signify that you are in danger, or watch a Gen X-vlogger-turned-Gen-Z’s-uncle teach the world about The Phantom of Heilbronn (thanks, Hank).
Even though you can “like” or “favorite” the videos you love the most, this is the only discernment that the majority of users are allowed to make. The only difference between the two is that the videos you like more can be favorited, while the videos that you merely “like” live in their own separate space – oftentimes, those videos overlap, as seen below:
It’s not that I’m such an organized person that I need the ability to properly sort my favorite videos on TikTok, it’s that I want to be able to put them in a place that makes sense. A couple of months ago, I favorited a video that included various writing exercises I wanted to try, and it was only recently that I remembered those exercises even existed when I was scrolling through the ocean of my other favorited videos. It’s such a simple feature to re-implement, and it would make a world of difference.
What’s even more puzzling than not allowing the entirety of its 1 billion users to properly categorize their videos is that some users once had the ability (and then were inexplicably stripped of it) to categorize their favorites, while others are still able to utilize the “Collections” feature:
Not having the ability to organize your favorite TikToks is akin to not being able to organize photos in a photo-sharing app – imagine if you favorited a picture from your camera roll, and then the “favorites” folder on your phone was the only place that your photo lived. I think it’s nice to organize your pictures into places and timeframes, isn’t it? Not to mention other social media apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest (the original social media organizing platform) all have at least some feature that allows you to group videos, snaps, or posts.
There is a work-around to this problem, though, but it includes downloading an additional app on your phone (such as PinTok , PickTock, or Odin); if you’re willing to add one more thing to your homescreen, any of those apps are perfectly acceptable options. But if all you want to do is put a TikTok of journal prompts into a collection called “writing exercises,” for now, we’ll have to sort through our own digital messes until TikTok makes the “Collections” feature universally available.
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