One of TikTok's innovations was self-distributing content.

Originally in social, feeds were manually curated by each user.

Then Facebook and others switched to algorithmically sorted feeds to focus attention on the stuff that was most engaging.

TikTok went a step further and didn't even make you follow anything in the first place.

This was the logical end point of engagement-maxing, and tends to give you content that is the equivalent of junk food.

But self-distributing content that aligns with your aspirations could be a net positive.

Imagine self-distributing aspirational software.^[be]