#PastebinMonday 09/23/2024 I Can't Deal With TikTok Anymore Edition

'Sup, doods!

I hit my final straw with TikTok this past week.

In case you're new, I've spent several months trying to make TikTok a place where new doods could find my clips and get forwarded to my channel. The whole reason I started streaming to YouTube and Kick and Rumble in the first place was to get more eyes on what I'm doing. I need to expand my reach in order to make this a thing I can financially support myself to do and not rely on a crummy 9-5 job to pay the bills. I just want more control over my life, you know?

With that in mind, doods, I pushed myself to find new places to seek a bigger audience. Twitch relaxing on their simulcast rules last year made it easier for me to make that push. One of the places I thought I could tap into was TikTok. Even now, there is a niche to be filled of someone who can show off high level Puzzle League gameplay and I had the setup to put out a new clip from the streams each and every day. I was going to do this for YouTube shorts, anyway. Why not add a similar format to TikTok and make it the first place to see what I'm up to as an incentive to go there?

Well, it was starting to become sunshine and rainbows until TikTok started flagging my videos for violating their guidelines. Which guideline did I violate? They didn't tell me. How did I violate said guideline? They didn't tell me. I would send an appeal of the flagging and TikTok would restore the video. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Until they didn't.

And it was then I became aware of what it was they thought I was doing. Of all of the appeals I had submitted on my videos, only one was ever rejected... for PROMOTING A GAMBLING SERVICE.

Doods, did I screw up by turning my account into a business account and label it as a Gaming account? Is THAT what TikTok means by Gaming? I guess I'll never know because it's impossible--for the rank-and-file users, I suppose--to talk to a human and get any explanation. All I can do is guess.

At some point, just about every video I would upload would get flagged. And then TikTok restricted my ability make appeals, meaning that any new video I put up could only be seen on my Profile--and maybe also by my followers? I still don't understand how that works, dood. It was then that I realized that things would not change unless I found a place to yell at TikTok support. Their @TikTokSupport hasn't posted anything in three years so no one's looking at that account. My last resort was to “scream” at @tiktok_us to get me a person to speak to about this. No one ever replied, because of course they didn't.

After that, the occasional video did get through. The occasional video was able to be appealed. However, it was taking away from my video editing time to keep @ing them every so often.

With that in mind, I made the decision to stop posting on the account.

I recorded a video making an announcement & airing my grievances and added it to my TikTok on Saturday. And you won't believe what happened next. Or maybe you will.

TikTok flagged that video, too. LOL

Dood, TikTok did not want me there at all. Even with multiple videos of mine getting 2,000 views, once they started flagging every new thing I would put up, my videos became dead on arrival. I am glad to not have to mess with that platform anymore. On the bright side, at least the people that did comment there were curious. I don't have any gripes with them.

I am keeping the account open on the hope that I will, one day, garner the audience to justify uploading there. I do need to keep a reminder of why I left—oh, and make sure no one else can claim the handle, I suppose.

Speaking of stopping things, dood, I am deciding here and now that I will be continuing my grind for PPL V-Hard WR on Tuesdays through Thursdays and, once I accomplish that feat, I will be stopping all of my Tuesday-Thursday streams until further notice. If the major tournament is still going on, I will not be bringing them back during the tournament. I am not going to be able to maintain an audience by just streaming. The people need to be caught up on the speedruns I have done this year--and I have posted very few of them. I need to catch up on my videos and get myself in a position to actually resume work on my tutorial series. Until I finish that tutorial series, I am not going to feel good about the continuous backlog of videos I have been promising.

Now if you'll excuse me, I was secretly composing this update while proctoring one of the upcoming tournament matches. Now that I have it recorded, I need to edit a little thing out of it. I swear, I don't have enough video editing going on in my life, dood.


Today's (permanent) extra streaming goals (this won't be going down for a while, will it):

Goal #2: edit personal best videos in Tetris Attack Easy – V-Hard (post commentary recorded) and Normal (post commentary recorded)—and everything I did in Pokemon Puzzle Week—and that S-Hard PB.
Goal #5b: finalize the tournament layout once and for all in a way that I can adapt for the Pokemon Puzzle League tournament and every other game we might play. I might need Thanksgiving to start doing this.
Goal #6a: clean up my own stream layout. Most of the framework necessary for a semi-proper stream is done now thanks to streaming the process, though I'm not currently motivated to stream any other part of it at the moment. Next major objective is to make alerts. I have stream reaction clips to put in. Emotes, one or two alternate overlay themes, and alternate timer themes would come soon after, though I will put in any timer theme I can use from Pokémon Puzzle League upon request. As soon as I think of things to put in, I will add them to the list.
Goal #6b: catch up on video archives that I have yet to upload since I restarted streaming. I may put them on a separate channel.
Goal #7: script and record footage for my Puzzle League tutorial series. I have some scripts left to touch up before feeling comfortable with moving on to recording gameplay. Then I will need to record my talking points and edit it all together. Getting back to this will be easier once the workflow for the monthly tournaments is finalized.
Goal #8: release the Puzzle League tutorial series YouTube shorts once a day until they're all done. I really do think I need to time the release of the series with a ramping up of my streaming schedule so that I can take advantage of whatever there is to gain from releasing the shorts.

This week's schedule:

Tuesday @8pm – 9:30pm ET – Questing for PB - Pokémon Puzzle League V-Hard PB Attempts
Wednesday @8pm – 9:30pm ET – Questing for PB
Thursday @8pm – 9:30pm ET – Questing for PB
Friday @8pm – 10:30pm ET – Friday Night Salt Mines: Expecting a Super Hard Tournament Match Edition, Doods!
Saturday @2pm ET – Hosting PPL Tournament at PuzzleSpeedrun, Dood!
Sunday @2pm ET – Hosting PPL Tournament at PuzzleSpeedrun, Dood!


That’s my life story for the week. Until next time, everyone, be decent to each other. Later, doods!

--Cards