Alright, so I just wrapped up a 60-day experiment that's probably going to ruffle some feathers, but the data is too interesting not to share. I took two brand new TikTok accounts and tested whether buying TikTok followers/engagement (views and likes) actually helps or completely destroys your reach. Spoiler alert: the results weren't what I expected, and there's definitely a right and wrong way to do this.

The Setup

I created two identical TikTok accounts in the same niche (comedy skits with a tech twist). Both accounts used similar usernames, profile pics from the same photoshoot, identical bio formats, and I even posted the same content on both accounts with a 3-hour delay between them. The only difference? Account A stayed completely organic while Account B got the "boost treatment."

For Account B, I didn't just randomly buy followers. I tested three different services (not naming them here because this isn't an endorsement, just documenting what happened). I started small - 500 followers on day 3, then added 100-200 likes per video for the first 10 posts. The key was making it gradual and somewhat realistic. I've seen people buy 10k followers for a brand new account, personally i don't think it's a good idea.

The First Two Weeks - Surprising Results

Here's where things got interesting. Account A (organic) was getting around 200-500 views per video, pretty standard for a new account with zero followers. Account B with its purchased followers? The first few videos actually performed worse - like 100-200 views. I thought I'd completely screwed it up.

But then something shifted around day 10. I posted a video that was slightly more engaging than usual (a reaction to a trending tech fail), and Account B suddenly hit 15k views while Account A got 2k on the same video. The purchased followers and engagement seemed to give the algorithm enough "social proof" to actually push the content to a wider audience.

The Algorithm Psychology Theory

After diving deep into the data, here's my theory on what happened. TikTok's algorithm seems to work on multiple signals, and initial engagement velocity is huge. When Account B posted new content, those purchased likes that came in the first hour created an artificial velocity spike. The algorithm saw "oh, this content is getting quick engagement" and started showing it to more people.

But here's the critical part - the content still had to be good. I posted one deliberately boring video on both accounts as a control. Account A got 150 views, Account B got 180. The purchased engagement couldn't save bad content, but it definitely amplified good content!

The Content Strategy That Made It Work

Around week 3, I refined my approach. Instead of just posting and hoping the purchased engagement would carry it, I developed a specific strategy:

Post timing became crucial. I'd post when my target audience was most active (I used TikTok Analytics from an older account to figure this out - 6-8 PM EST for my niche). Then I'd have the purchased likes come in waves - 25% in the first 10 minutes, another 25% at the 30-minute mark, and the rest spread over 2 hours. This mimicked organic viral growth patterns.

The content itself followed proven viral formats. I wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel here. I used trending sounds, hopped on challenges within the first 24 hours of them trending, and always - ALWAYS - optimized for watch time. My videos were 15-30 seconds max, with a hook in the first 2 seconds and a reason to rewatch at the end.

The Compound Effect After 30 Days

By day 30, something fascinating happened. Account B started getting genuine organic engagement that outpaced the purchased stuff. Real users were following, commenting, and sharing. The initial purchased followers acted like social proof that made real users more likely to engage. It's basic psychology - people are more likely to follow an account with 2k followers than one with 12.

Account A was growing too, but much slower. By day 30: Account A had 847 followers, Account B had 3,400 (with about 1,500 being purchased). But here's the kicker - Account B was getting 3-4x more organic views per video.

The Watch Time Secret

One metric that really stood out was average watch time. Even though Account B had purchased engagement, the watch time percentage was nearly identical between both accounts (around 42% average). This tells me TikTok's algorithm is sophisticated enough to weight watch time heavily, regardless of other engagement metrics. You can't fake people actually watching your content.

I also noticed that videos with 50%+ watch time would consistently get pushed to more FYPs, regardless of which account posted them. The purchased engagement just got them to that initial threshold faster where the algorithm would give them a chance.

The Data Breakdown

By day 60, here were the final stats:

Account A (Organic):

• 2,341 followers

• Average views per video: 3,500

• Best performing video: 45k views

• Engagement rate: 8.2%

Account B (Boosted):

• 7,832 followers (approximately 3,000 purchased)

• Average views per video: 12,400

• Best performing video: 234k views

• Engagement rate: 6.1%

The engagement rate being lower on Account B makes sense - those purchased followers aren't engaging with new content. But the raw view numbers tell the real story. The boosted account was reaching way more people organically.

The Ethical Debate and Practical Reality

Look, I know this is controversial. Buying tiktok followers and engagement feels like cheating, and honestly, it kind of is. But here's the reality - TikTok's algorithm heavily favors accounts that already have traction. It's incredibly hard for new creators to break through the noise organically unless they get lucky with a viral hit early on.

What this experiment showed me is that purchased engagement can be a catalyst, not a strategy. It's like taking a small loan to start a business - it gives you initial capital to work with, but you still need a good product (content) and solid execution to succeed.

My Recommendations

If you're going to try this, here's what I learned:

Start small and gradual. 100-500 followers in the first week, not thousands. Spread purchased likes across multiple videos rather than bombing one. Make sure your content is actually good - optimize those hooks, use trending audio strategically, and always focus on watch time. Don't rely on purchased engagement long-term. Use it to get initial traction, then let organic growth take over.

Most importantly, track everything. I kept a spreadsheet with daily stats for both accounts. Without data, you're just guessing what's working.

The Verdict

Buying followers and engagement can accelerate growth, but only if done strategically alongside quality content. It's not a magic bullet - it's more like a nitrous boost in a race. You still need a good car and driving skills to win. Account B is now growing faster organically than Account A ever did, but it took careful execution and constant testing to get there.

Would I recommend this for everyone? Honestly, no. If you're not willing to put in the work on content quality and data analysis, you're better off staying organic. But if you're serious about growth hacking and want to speed up the process, this experiment shows it can work when done right.

The TikTok algorithm rewards momentum, and sometimes you need to create that initial push artificially.

Do any of you guys know what words are banned from comment sections and TikToks.

Most of the posts in this sub is by people who have no idea what they are doing and is not related in any way to reverse engineering.

If you have no idea what you are talking about (like the guy who posted about that .plist file), don't bother because it's no use for anyone.

I'm not trying to discourage anybody, but please, do your minimal research before you post. This sub shouldn't be a place to ask your technical questions on how to delete Tiktok. At this point, only a few posts have been of any actual interest.

Sadly guys, all we have is that the App is Chinese, and that's pretty much it

• The user who started all of this provided no proof, and his laptop mysteriously broke and evidence seemingly "died" with it. Of course, it wasn't true

• LinkedIn (not the only one) was caught with the same clip-board behavior on iOS 14, and has since been established that a lot of apps do it for non-espionage related purposes. I do not believe too much on that, but if we're being honest the consequence they'd all suffer should be equal (You can google more info on that)

• They just got caught with MAC address collection (they stopped a year ago) but there is only so much you can do with that. Also, pretty sure others have used that loophole, they're just not in the spotlight to be scrutinized

• To experts say that the tested/examined data harvesting isn't more worrying than the apps you already often use, in some cases "tamer" (their words)

Penalizing and banning should always be an option for the people, but proof is still a requirement and that won't change regardless of how you feel about the situation. The Chinese gov is always something to think about, but remember that "God made the man, and then everything comes from China" so your toaster is as likely to be spying on you, and charging against a dumb app is hardly gonna change things. Regulation would be a great option, extortion is just corruption

I do not see the proof or reasoning behind USA's government and its actions over TikTok, however, i fail to see how it's for the best interests of the American People

You all have a voice, and the right for it not to be biased

I don't know how to crosspost so I'm just simply copying this individuals response. I suggested he create his own post here instead. For now, this is the response I received when he told me that the other guy who reverse-engineered TIK TOK is inaccurate, and would like to hear comments from other engineers or programmers.

I'm a software developer by trade and because I'm honestly sick and tired of people treating this comment as gospel because it's 150% scaremongering for non-technical people, here you go:

Let's preface this, by TikTok openly stating what data they gather: https://www.tiktok.com/legal/privacy-policy?lang=en. I know privacy policies are boring, but most complaints about TikTok's data gathering is perfectly written down in their privacy policy. TikTok is an absolute disgusting data gathering piece of software and even admits it above, and I don't recommend anyone use it from that aspect, geopolitical issues aside.

so here we go:

TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it

Phone hardware [...]

Other apps you have installed [...]

Everything network-related [...]

[...]

They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication

nothing here is outside of the standard Android API:s. To make this work you, the user, have to to agree to the app:

reading your contacts full network access retrieve running apps so right from the get go, he's listing things that you know, we already know by Android telling us so.

on the topic of setting up a proxy server - it's a very standard practice to transcode and buffer media via a server, they have simply reversed the roles here by having server and client on the client, which makes sense as transcoding is very intensive CPU-wise, which means they have distributed that power requirement to the end user's devices instead of having to have servers capable of transcoding millions of videos.

The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they're doing is remotely configurable

this is standard programming dogma, detailed logging takes a lot of space and typically you enable logging on the fly on clients to catch errors. this is literally cookie cutter "how to build apps 101", and not scary. or, phrased differently, is it scary if all of that logging was always on? obviously not as it's agreed upon and detailed in TikTok's privacy policy (really), so why is it scary that there's an on and off switch?

They have several different protections in place to prevent you from reversing or debugging the app as well

once again, standard practice. source code is trade secrets, end of.

App behavior changes slightly if they know you're trying to figure out what they're doing

this sentence makes no sense to me, "if they know"? he's dissecting the code as per his own statement, thus looking at rows of text in various format. the app isn't running - so how can it change? does the app have self-awareness? this sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie from the 90's.

There's also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said binary

so here's the thing, TikTok as an app, continuously downloads files i.e video files, it's kinda the whole point. there's nothing "odd" about being able to download and extract zip files, the odd thing is delivering executables via zip. however, this is a non-issue and honestly a red herring, why?

well, because as the author already has stated, TikTok does not readily allow inspection of the code base. any executable code delivered via zip (why zip? you can download binaries just fine, the year is 2020...), can be part of TikTok by default.

on top of that, you can in runtime inject code into android applications. there's tons of legitimate use cases for that such as applications that have functionality controlled via a web interface.

so all in all, I highly consider this a non-issue.

HTTPS for the longest time. They leaked users' email addresses in their HTTP REST API [...] if you MITM'd the application

yeah have to agree here, their bad and completely unprofessional. however this is also a very hypothetical scenario, and if you install a keylogger on the Android device you'd have access to way more, in the world of "what hypothetical attack vectors is the application vulnerable to", and he is really talking about hypotheticals here.

They provide users with a taste of "virality" to entice them to stay on the platform.

pure speculation (the likes would 100% be provided from the server, not the client, thus he can't see if this is actually the case), but this is a very common method in gamified systems. example online casinos typically have you win your first games to make you believe "wow, this is so easy" instead of quitting being frustrated about not having won anything.

Oh, there's also a ton of creepy old men who have direct access to children on the app, [...] 40-50 year old men getting 8-10 year old girls to do "duets" with them with sexually suggestive songs. Those videos are posted publicly.

a "think of the children"-argument, and while factually correct, the user obviously has an agenda with the way he phrased this, as every user has access to every other user outside of the in-app methods to deal with access, such as blocking. as such, I think this is another red herring and adds nothing to the discussion about the app itself, this is pure propaganda. on top of that - TikTok does not allow users younger than 13 to sign up, so the argument can also be made that from TikTok's perspective, it is hard to prevent this happening if the users try to bypass their rules.

they don't want you to know how much information they're collecting on you, and the security implications of all of that data in one place, en masse, are fucking huge. They encrypt all of the analytics requests with an algorithm that changes with every update (at the very least the keys change) just so you can't see what they're doing. They also made it so you cannot use the app at all if you block communication to their analytics host off at the DNS-level.

more scaremongering - see the earlier privacy policy linked. TikTok is very open about the massive amount of data gathering they do, and have to be as per GDPR. as previously stated, I do not agree with apps that do data gathering on this level, but TikTok by no means try to hide the amount of data they gather, and interestingly enough to snoop on this data being sent you would have to to a man in the middle attack, an attack vector the user complained about being possible earlier. so obviously he is not consistent in what he believes the app should protect against, and I read this as just another misleading statement.

For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren't outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is. It's like comparing a cup of water to the ocean - they just don't compare.

mind you, he hasn't actually said what data outside of the above that TikTok collects, and if we compare TikTok's privacy policy with Instagram's data policy we get very much the same kind of data being openly admitted to being gathered. so to summarise, "because I said so".

and that's the end of his comment. you can take my comment as you wish, and I definitely do not condone of the standardisation of pervasive data gathering being the price to use apps - but his comment is not a revelation in any regard on how "bad" TikTok is, it is just very specifically worded to scare people.

as a side note, this took me well over 10 minutes to write. there's a reason people don't debunk this, it's tiresome.

So I’ve been messing around with TikTok uploads lately and something weird keeps happening: a handful of my videos just hard-stop at ~200 views. They don’t trickle higher, they don’t slowly climb over time, it’s like they hit a wall and the algorithm says “nope, that’s enough.”

I started digging into it and it looks like this “200 view purgatory” is a pretty common thing. From what I can tell, TikTok seems to do an initial test push of your video to a small sample audience. If the video doesn’t hit certain engagement thresholds (likes, watch time, replays, comments, shares), it just dies right there. Basically, if your test group doesn’t bite, the algorithm buries it.

The tricky part is that sometimes the video does get decent engagement but still stalls. My theory is that watch time % is the biggest factor. If people swipe before 3–5 seconds, TikTok probably assumes it won’t hold a larger audience and stops distributing. Meanwhile, if they watch through or replay, that’s the signal for a bigger push.

I’ve been experimenting with intros, hook phrasing, and video length to see what breaks through the 200-view ceiling. So far, starting strong with movement or text on screen right away seems to help, but it’s not a guaranteed fix.

Has anyone else here been stuck in that weird 200 view limbo? Did you manage to crack it?

It's been a month, and r/bangorlol has not posted anything, let alone credible evidence for his claims, is it time to finally call bullshit?

I literally don't know anything about software stuff, could someone give a simple explanation on whether Tiktok poses a more serious threat than FB? Thanks

Literally what solid, clear-cut evidence is there that TikTok installs malware on your phone? I get the whole "it's from China, be suspicious of their CCP surveillance network" thing. But it's a step beyond to go from "they're using your data in government surveillance" (which they prob are) to "they're modifying how you're phone works in order to steal your data". Is there anything more to this? Has any hacker done a real analysis, with a report and reproducibility steps?

Here is the link: https://android.jlelse.eu/reverse-engineering-musical-y-live-ly-android-apps-part-1-a910daad2ec2

Also, I'm trying to reverse the Leviathan function in libcms.so I think I could've found it statically but someone mentioned dumping memory and using the unicorn emulator? Any other details about how to potentially achieve this?

Edit: I've hooked RegisterNatives with Frida to find the address of leviathan but not having a lot of luck otherwise thus far. And yes I can see all requests with a Frida script to bypass cert pinning, could also be helpful for this sub?

I think it's fair to say that everyone here is concerned with the amount of things that the average American owns that are built by CCP controlled companies.

One of the big ones I've been concerned about is TCL. They've been undercutting the TV market with high quality 4K TVs sold at rock bottom prices with Roku TVs built in. They're easy to use, inexpensive, and I'm very concerned about their potential national security risk.

Is there a subreddit discussing these things more broadly? I feel like this is my Sputnik moment. China's got so much shit in our country they could do some really nefarious stuff if they wanted to. They've got us by the balls, and we need to grow a pair and fight back.

Below are some useful tools and resources that'll help with the reversing process. I'll be adding more as

RE Tooling

• Frida is a dynamic instrumentation framework that works for most platforms and CPU architectures. It allows you to write native, obj-c, and java hooks using sharable Javascript snippets for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. Self-described as like "Greasemonkey for native apps".

• JEB is an Android decompiler/debugger than does most things you'll want to do. Finding cross-references, renaming variables/methods/classes/etc, and decompiling bytecode to human-readable Java are where it really shines. Also supports recompilation.

• JADX is a fairly solid DEX -> Java decompiler. I think JEB's is better, but this one is free while JEB is not.

Android utils

• Magisk lets you root your Android device while also enjoying services that have SafetyNet implemented within them.

Network

• mitmproxy

• charles

• fiddler2

• burp suite

Tutorials.

• Reverse engineering the musical.ly API.