(The Washington Post) – More than 800 U.S. TikTok users shared their data with The Washington Post. We used it to find out why some people become power users, spending hours per day scrolling.

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, share little about how the app keeps users coming back. Journalists and researchers have utilized bot accounts to simulate how the recommendation system is tied to watch time and have conducted self-reported user surveys. But none of these approaches captures real human behavior.

So The Washington Post, through an unprecedented partnership with our readers, collected TikTok watch histories from 1,100 users. We created a database of roughly 15 million videos served up to them in a six-month period last year. Our analyses showed just how effective TikTok is at getting even its heaviest users to swipe more and watch more on its platform. (Read More)