Find out the upload date of a video on Tiktok

While the creators say the lack of timestamps can be frustrating, the design choice almost certainly helps increase engagement for Bytedance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok and one of the world's most valuable startups. TikTok's feed is endless, and it's dangerously easy to lose hours watching videos in the app. But the experience is different from scrolling through Instagram, where signposts remind you that you've plunged three years into someone's past. If TikTok gave similar guidance, “it would interrupt our consumption of this endless stream,” says Ben Grosser, a professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the artist who created Demetricator, a tool that strips social media sites of metrics like likes, reposts, and timestamps.

Grosser says his research shows that users treat old content on social media differently: anything older than two days is often not worth paying attention to. For example, it's now considered a minor oversight to comment on someone's Facebook status a week after it was posted - meaning you weren't paying attention or, worse, snooping. There's no similar harm in liking a TikTok video from 10 days ago, as there's no way to know it was uploaded that long ago.

Grosser also notes that unlike Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook, TikTok does not allow users to keep track of time by closing the clock displayed at the top of their iPhone. This means that TikTok users, can quickly lose track of how many minutes he or she has spent in the app. To deal with this, I recently started subconsciously counting time on TikTok terms, telling myself, for example, that I can watch three more videos before getting back to work, which is roughly equivalent to a minute or two. In this way, says Grosser, I came up with my own internal way of measuring time, since the platform refused to provide the ones I usually rely on.

The lack of time on TikTok helps dictate not only user behavior, but also what content can thrive on the app. Timestamps, for example, are an integral part of news. By not having them, TikTok subtly signals to users that it's not a platform for world events, but simply to “inspire creativity and bring joy,” which is a much less controversial mission. This ideal is reflected in the media organizations that TikTok has, such as The Washington Post, which almost exclusively publishes jokes and skits for its audience of nearly 150,000 subscribers, rather than news updates.

Reducing the incentive to publish news content also helps TikTok potentially avoid scandals that have affected other platforms, such as accusations of political bias. The company has shown it has no qualms about censoring potentially controversial posts: moderation rules obtained by The Guardian show that TikTok staff have been instructed to censor topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government, as well as LGBT content in some markets. The company said the instructions were out of date.

But by omitting timestamps, TikTok could fall victim to other scandals, such as spreading misinformation. It is much harder to recognize the legitimacy of a video when it is impossible to determine when it was created. For example, the hashtag #protest includes numerous clips that appear to refer to recent strikes against climate change organized by youth last month. But without any date attached to them, it's often hard to say for sure. And while TikTok avoids revealing dates and times, other platforms such as Facebook have recently started providing users with even more of this data to combat their problems with fake news.

TikTok's perpetual status also has more down-to-earth but still annoying implications. Katie Swanson, a Wisconsin mom better known as coupon_katie, has amassed more than 600,000 subscribers on the platform by showcasing her insanely advanced couponing skills. When she finds a good deal, Swanson often enthusiastically advises her fans to run to the store before it expires. But they have no way of knowing when that was, since viewers can't tell when Swanson posted. “A lot of my videos are time-sensitive, so if they see one of my videos too late, they may not know if they missed a deal or not,” says Swanson, who recently started including the date in her captions. “I like that my older content can always be viewed, but a time stamp would be great.”

TikTok's creators say the lack of timing metrics on the platform exacerbates other problems, such as content theft. “It can be hard to tell who posted a video first when two similar videos appear at the same time,” says Leanna Renee, a TikToker user with more than 200,000 subscribers known by the pseudonym leannuh47. To track their performance, some TikTokers use our tool.