On its own, TikTok is a strange place interspersed with a gold mine of hilarious videos and fantastic content. But scroll for long enough, and you’ll invariably stumble across a TikTok live that makes you question your faith in humanity. Now, a viral clip from the TikTok star Pinkydoll has everyone wondering, what the actual fuck is going on with TikTok live? Except, the video isn’t surprising in the slightest. It was always meant to be this way.


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“I’ve never seen anything like this,” @cookingnflowers commented. “Can’t even begin to process it.”


“I just feel so old,” @BadJohnBrown added. “I don't know what's going on or why anybody is getting paid.”


The answer to both questions is surprisingly simple, if not dishearteningly predictable. As @BobIsntFunny so eloquently puts it, “This is a rule as old as the internet: If you can't figure out who a thing is for, it's a sex thing.”


Pinkydoll is a SFW cam girl of sorts and uses TikTok live’s donation service to make money. Each donation corresponds to a different movement or noise, and the low prices of different donation types, (sometimes just a fraction of a cent), make quick interactions incredibly easy for all parties.


“It’s the human equivalent of candy crush,” @Ronenl joked.





“What part of the human brain is this meant to light up?” @thomas_violence asked. “What is it doing to the people who enjoy it?”


It’s a genuine question and one that’s hard to answer. But somehow the human brain, or at least many people’s brains, are drawn to this series of motions and noises long enough to get a stream off the ground, or a viral tweet going.



Pinkydoll is far from the only creator to take advantage of the lightning-fast microtransaction model on TikTok live, and the service is littered with content tailored to instant gratification or the false promise of it.





The longer the internet progresses, the more it learns how to take advantage of our woefully out-of-date and gullible brain chemistry. It makes perfect sense that content tailored to an algorithm completely reliant on stopping scrolling viewers would be fetishized brain mush. It was always meant to be.


“This is the way the world ends,” @as_a_worker tweeted. “Not with a bang, not with a whimper but with a ‘yum yum yum, gang gang.’”