THE O.K LIST #23 / Dora explains how TikTok has fallen like tomatoes from a bridge.

Sunday is not a business day, but for TikTok and its providers, it was the busiest of days, blocking access to over 170 Million US users and then restoring it in the span of just a few hours.

Kesha might have forecasted the rise of TikTok in the early 2000s but Katy Perry saw the yo-yo of emotions from a mile away. In her 2008 hit she sings "You're up then you're down / You're wrong when it's right", and nothing feels more wrong than to get TikTok restored by the hands of Trump.

But we listen and don't judge. So listen up, Linda. There's more to this ban than it meets the eye, and we're covering here what we can.

THE LITTLE RED BOOK

People hate Meta so much that they'd rather give their data to China than move back to Instagram. With anxiety looming with the "will-they-won't-they" TikTok ban, US users flocked to China-based app Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), more commonly known as RedNote.

The app, mostly used by Chinese nationals (300 Million active users) for tips related to travel, music, food, and make-up, was flooded by some 700.000 new American users over the weekend.

The sudden influx of content tagged with the #TikTokRefugee hashtag generated over 250 million views and 5.5 Million comments, mainly about how to bridge the gap between the local and the social immigrant community arriving in the app.

While most users welcomed their new friends with advice on how to use the platform, which is in many ways closer to Instagram in functionality, others have asked them to be respectful and leave politics out the door.

With TikTok access restored for now, the future of relevance of RedNote for Western audiences remains uncertain, but we can't say the brief exchange between US and China on the app hasn't had its many positives, especially when it comes to Americans realizing Chinese people are just people like them, only with much better access to fresh food.

META GOES TIKTOK (LITERALLY)

Meanwhile, Meta decided it was time for a change and focused, again, on offering its users something they absolutely neither wanted nor needed.

After upsetting people by replacing its third-party fact-checking system with community notes, announcing a return to promoting political content, and eliminating restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, they now say goodbye to the square feed and hello to vertical rectangles, messing up with everyone's carefully curated personal pages.

On a better note, the new change allows some new features that are cool (albeit, none specifically connect to it having to be rectangles).

Users now have the ability to customize individual thumbnails, as well as move story highlights into the grid, or add them as a tab.

The new grid is also entirely customizable, and users can re-order posts in whatever order they want

Okay, so maybe it is not ALL bad, but it is surely time to rethink those thumbnails you had already scheduled for posting.

PS: you can now vent your frustration on the newly created Facebook account on TikTok ??

HIGH ON LIGHTS

Drugs and psychedelics are topics we don't explore here much, but we simply might have to with the touted Psychedelic Renaissance coming full force as a trend from 2025 onwards.

Psychedelic experiences are leading the way in alternative medicine and starting to cross the border into official healthcare systems. In Germany, you can already buy weed directly from a pharmacy, and the U.S. is projected to spend upwards of $6 billion by 2030 on Ketamine therapy.

But you don't have to rely on drugs to trip balls. You can just use your phone, really.

Lumenate is an application that uses a combination of stroboscopic light and audio (voice-over and music) to guide users into trippy mediation modes that can help with their anxiety, emotional blocks, and even better sleep.

The use of strobing light to get "high" dates back as far as Nostradamus, who used to stare into the sun to get his visions, and Brion Gysin's Dreamachine, which debuted at Paris’ Museé des Arts Decoratifs in 1962.

The Lumenate app is backed by research at Sussex University, which found that “stroboscopic stimulation offers a powerful non-pharmacological means of inducing ASC [altered states of consciousness] as well as providing a possible adjunct to psychedelic therapies”.

So... let's get trippy, I guess...

THE FALL OF TOMATO BRIDGE

In more serious news, the“Cherry Tomato Bridge” has fallen!

The Dublin bridge - originally Drumcondra Bridge - became internet-famous over the last week, after a TikTok user posted a photo of some cherry tomatoes that someone had littered on the bridge wall. They had frozen due to cold weather and so people started to have fun, placing more and more tomatoes over the last 6 days.

On Google Maps the place was tagged as “the Shrine of the Sacred Cherry Tomatoes of Drumcondra” and drew massive crowds of gawkers, who disrupted local traffic.

I guess one of those drivers was not too happy, and decided to push the tomatoes off to a horrible death. Will Drumcondra survive? Only time will tell.

BRANDS DOING IT

Nickelodeon has completely reshaped its content calendar, and now the brand's IP introduces you to what is happening in pop culture. This can lead to pretty cool moments like Dora explaining the term "It's Giving" and Jimmy Neutron commenting on the NFL Wildcard.

The move is consistent with IPs that want to grow beyond their original target age and carry relevance well into their teenage years, just like when Mattel set up Barbie with a vlog to debate the Dream Gap concept a few years back.

After plenty of leaks, Nintendo finally released their first look at the Switch 2, the company's console to tackle the PS5. Although we were undoubtedly excited, we can't say the road to the reveal hasn't been frustrating, with third-party developers showcasing the model inadvertently during the CES, and renders making it to influencers' hands before official word from the game company.

Not that we are complaining, we will spend our hard-earned money on it as soon as it launches with the newly teased Mario Kart.

Facebook seems to have awakened to the threat of CapCut and is soft-releasing Edits, a new app to help creators edit social videos. We just hope this is any better than Instagram's native Reels editing suite, which is so atrocious no one is using it.

THE PLAYLIST

Two words: Bad Bunny.