🗂️Keep in Mind The Pros and Cons of the Best TikTok Alternatives

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I love TikTok. As a grown-ass adult, this is not something I am proud of, nor will I share the total number of hours I’ve spent scrolling to fall asleep, pass the time or catch up on what Good Boy Ollie is doing. As Sunday gets nearer, with no word from the Supreme Court, I am feeling increasingly bereft. Everyone I know on TikTok is talking about the same thing: Where are we going next?

While a lot of options have been bandied about, and new apps emerge almost daily, there are still few platforms that share the most common traits of TikTok. Here are a couple.

Red Note​

If you love TikTok, opening Red Note will cause you to immediately relax—it looks remarkably similar. Well, first you have to go through a daunting sign-up process where you agree to who-knows-what in Chinese, and fumble through finding anyone you know.

Credit: Amanda Blum

Pros: Red Note looks and feels a lot like the original recipe; if all you need for your fix is the ability to scroll through an endless feed of content, Red Note could legitimately fill your cup. There’s a “For You” tab, and you can like, follow and favorite, like you had previously. There’s even an alternative to TikTok Shop.

You will meet fascinating new people (many Red Note users seem eager to welcome Americans) and bonus: You might learn some Chinese. Creating posts is also quite similar to TikTok, where you can choose video or photo, add music, captions (subtitles), filters and have access to the same editing tools.

Traditional hashtags aren't clickable, but if you can find the Chinese equivalent, it will work. Credit: Amanda Blum

Cons: There are no hashtags—when you see them in posts, they won’t work. There do seem to be Chinese hashtags, if you can figure out the Chinese equivalents. Otherwise, if that’s how you found content or “your people” on TikTok, you're out of luck, at least for now.

Red Note doesn’t know you yet, so moving from TikTok—where serious users enjoy a highly curated feed—to Red Note is going to feel dissociative for a little bit, as it learns your likes. While you might find previous TikTok users on Red Note by searching for their usernames individually, remember, not everyone is affected by the ban—only Americans. Because international users have had no need to move from TikTok, you probably won’t find them.

In the last week on Red Note, many users of content no one would consider controversial have been banned, after only a day or their first post. In particular, it seems a lot of content creators making queer content are being banned (and when signing up, your only options for gender are binary). Remember, Red Note comes with a lot of political baggage that TikTok doesn’t.

It's entirely possible, too, that Red Note could one day be subject to a similar legal action as TikTok; that said, it took years for the current suit to proceed through the courts.

Gender choices are binary. Credit: Amanda Blum

Takeaway: My gut is that Red Note will figure out fast how to localize the app so Americans see it in English; from the time I logged in yesterday to today, I'd swear that they’ve added more TikTok-like functionality. While I was turned off initially, today I found myself wanting to invest a little time finding people I followed on TikTok and seeing what happens. I’m also, however, deeply curious about what I agreed to when I signed up.

Instagram Reels​

In many ways, Reels seems the obvious successor to TikTok, although it's different in how you interact with your audience. Reels are more like a longer Instagram Story than a TikTok.

Pros: You probably already know how to use Reels. It lacks some of the robust editing tools that TikTok has, but still has captions, filters, music and text. You can tag people and businesses, locations, and target specific audiences. Comments aren’t limited to a few sentences. Obviously, Instagram has the advantage of being in English, and uses hashtags to help people navigate.

Cons: Instagram is Meta, and Meta is on the cusp of some big changes regarding moderation. Part of the beauty of TikTok was the exceptional moderation tools, which kept everyone behaving generally well. Complaints about the Instagram algorithm are endless and justified; you have very little control over what you see or who sees you, despite following accounts or asking not to see others. You’ll see a lot of ads. And everything about Instagram is about selling, boosting or pushing, which is a real turnoff to many creators.

Reels doesn't seem to want to keep you in Reels—it routinely pushes you to regular Instagram. If you search by hashtag, you'll end up with a mix of posts and Reels (but not Stories).

Credit: Amanda Blum

Lastly, you can’t watch videos in 2x time on Reels, which feels downright insulting.

Takeaway: It’s likely you’re already using Instagram Reels, in addition to TikTok, because many content creators bifurcate their social media accounts, using them for different purposes, with different audiences. If that’s the case, you might consider starting a new IG account to migrate your TikTok followers to. It certainly seems like most users are offering an Instagram account for followers, and many TikTokers have always kept an IG Reels account as a backup for their TikTok. You’re likely to find a similar audience, if less well-behaved, on Instagram Reels.

YouTube Shorts​

A lot of the big content creators are headed to YouTube and YouTube Shorts, and there’s good reason: money. If you monetize TikTok, Youtube is the most stable, predictable channel there is for similar income, and many of those large creators started on YouTube in longer-form video. Shorts ends up feeling like a rudimentary TikTok, with less curation and less ability to organize. Since almost everyone knows what YouTube classic offers (ads, sponsor lead-ins and uncurated comments), let’s talk about Shorts.

Pros: YouTube isn’t going anywhere, ever. People know the platform, and they know what to expect from YouTube. You probably already have the app installed on your phone. Like Reels, the feed is mostly full of regurgitated TikToks, so it feels familiar. You can like a post (or dislike, which is a new and fun way to endure rejection), and subscribe to other users. You can also search by hashtag, and have the choice to watch Shorts or full-length videos.

Credit: Amanda Blum

Cons: Shorts are, at max, three minutes long, not longer as with TikTok and Reels. While there is a simple interface for making and uploading videos, it's overly simple. Unlike TikTok, you upload and process your Shorts video first and then edit it in the cloud, not locally on your phone to upload afterwards, which feels like a big commitment if you're not sure you're ready. There's no place to add captions, and while YouTube might add them via AI, they often contain errors. As with Instagram Reels, you have to watch Shorts at regular speed, even though you can speed up full-length videos.

There's a truly abhorrent lack of comment-moderation tools, or moderation, period. YouTube is (still) the Wild West, and for that reason, many find it unappealing.

Takeaway: Shorts feels like a very different product than TikTok. Which is surprising, because classic Youtube generally incurs deeper and more loyal relationships between creators and watchers, where people are more tuned into specific creators than trends, hashtags or communities. Shorts, however, misses the mark on all of that. I suspect people who migrate back to YouTube will do so for long-form videos, not Shorts.

The bottom line​

It’s not so much that all American TikTok users are scattering to the wind. In the “this is the last video I’ll be making on TikTok” videos I’m consuming, users are posting links to all the platforms I named above, and one more: Bluesky. While Bluesky only allows you to post 60-second videos, it feels like a home base until the swarm figures out where to settle.

Realistically, for a while, I think you’ll be seeing the same content across all three platforms while we wait it out and pray for TikTok to be brought back from the dead. All three of these tools have the same portrait-orientation video, with the ability to remix and share, and add music.
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