TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging
TikTok livestreams are a bizarre experience that doesn't get fully conveyed by this article. Scrolling through TikTok it will start showing you live streams every once in a while, and they tend to fall in to patterns like:* baby with a giant deformed head in some kind of medical setting, unable to tell if that baby is real -- if it is, then it's not a good situation for that baby* people who outwardly have disabilities of some sort, but it also looks like how you'd act as having a severe disability if you're a con-artist (like constantly shaking, or very slurred speech, I still can't whether these are legit or not)* people with these vibrating bowls of sand with crystals in them, and they take crystals out of the bowl every once in a while to show you* a teenager building a house of cards, and when they get a certain sticker, they have to destroy the house of cards and start building it again. they are pretending to cry while doing this, and begging you not to give them that sticker    \* there was also a variation where it was a kid deleting games off their PlayStation when they got a certain sticker

* people pretending to sleep, and if you donate different kinds of stickers, it plays different loud sounds or trigger lights to "wake" them* people freestyle rapping on the spot, but it's more like 
melodic rambling to the same backing track, so you don't really have to rhyme, you just have to rap in a way that sounds like it rhymes or makes sense* and my favourite: some workers in what seems to be a Chinese factory assembling something like AirPods. they take the airpods, they take the case, they put the airpods in the case, and they throw the whole thing on to the completed pileI came across one last night that I hadn't seen before and was kind of cool. It was a livestream of a woman filling a washing machine with different detergents, and like, way too much detergents for a load, way too much, and then eventually she turned the machine on.It's a wild show that you don't ask for, it gets thrust on you every once in a while when scrolling. The whole game is to give viewers a reason to use stickers on the show, which gives the streamer money (and TikTok like 70% of it).