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To each his own. I find the meandering prose refreshing. Especially in an article like this where I’m predisposed to find the subject distasteful, it breaks down the defenses a bit and helps me to keep an open mind. When you get to that point, you find it’s not just about “how some TikTok manager games the system.”

Not that every article written in this way is a winner. But this one benefitted from the format imo

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Funny how it had the opposite effect on me. Sure, I already think the whole thing is distasteful (to put it mildly), but all that "meandering prose" only drove it home to me, paragraph by paragraph, just how despicable the whole thing is.

"How some TikTok manager games the system" is an abstract thing. A deep dive into a real step-by-step approach of pumping phony "content" and sneaking it past viewers' defenses - that's a concrete thing that couldn't be more disgraceful, save only for if the article explained that it's all done for a singular reason: every part of this self-referential loop of "content" is an opportunity to get viewers to spend money. That's where the funds for all of this come from: everyone there is a piece of the advertising machine.

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