TikTok is making other video platforms better.

TikTok gets a lot of hate these days for political reasons, but that's not what this is about. Instead I just wanted to share a couple things that TikTok does right, that other companies are copying, and it is giving major QoL improvements all around.

TikTok introduced holding down on the screen to speed up videos at least 8 months ago now, and it has been a game changer. Google, despite trying their best to get TikTok banned in the US, must be paying close attention, as a couple months ago Google added the same feature to YouTube.

While YouTube has had the ability to change playback speed for years now, it was always multiple clicks away to enable it, and then disable it. I guess it never occurred to them to take the UX into consideration.

Another, arguably more innovative TikTok feature, that I've just noticed is live on YouTube as well, is the ability to scrub videos one handed. Trying to scrub through a video on YouTube prior to this change was a chore. You had to grab the seek bar and drag your finger to the point of the video you wanted to go to, and then let go. This made one-handed scrubbing nearly impossible, especially if you have a large phone.

The way TikTok implements scrubbing is genius. You put your finger anywhere on the seek bar and drag it left and right. Instead of the play head (or I guess in TikToks case, the play.. ball?) jumping to the location of your finger, it just moves left and right from where it originally was.

These two TikTok features are a great example of why competition is a good thing. It keeps companies innovating and bringing the best experience to us all. Without TikTok, who knows how long it would've taken Google to implement these features on YouTube, if at all.