The Strange Story of TikTok.com
Before ByteDance's algorithm, tiktok.com was the "digital diary" of a quiet American family, Scott and Tomoko. The article recounts how this old site, rediscovered years later via the Wayback Machine, triggered a cultural short-circuit in Gen Z.
Homepage of TikTok
If you had typed tiktok.com into your browser twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have found ByteDance’s algorithm. You would have found a "family bulletin." Scott (the dad) posted updates about his model trains and Lego sets; Tomoko shared recipes; there were grainy photos of their son, Kai, and birthday parties. No chase for likes, no curated aesthetic. Just a family using the web as an open diary, back when the internet was an archipelago of happy islands.
Around 2011, however, the site stopped updating. The domain expired, was "parked," and the family faded into analog obscurity. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, an empire was rising. ByteDance acquired Musical.ly and needed a global, short, onomatopoeic name. They chose "TikTok." They bought the old dismissed domain and, with a single click, wiped the family’s history to make room for the black and cyan logo we know today (to this day, the sum paid for the domain remains unknown).
The real "horror," however, began in 2020. When YouTubers and web archaeologists (like the channel Timeworks) used the Wayback Machine to exhume the old site, it triggered a cultural short-circuit. For Gen Z, accustomed to the performative perfection of social media, the raw authenticity of Scott and Tomoko’s photos appeared alien, almost sinister. In a world built on the attention economy, normality became suspicious. That "radical banality" was reinterpreted through the lenses of Analog Horror and True Crime:
- "Why did they post this stuff if they didn't want fame?"
- "That shadow in the photo is definitely an omen."
- "Did ByteDance make them disappear?"
What was simply a commercial transaction turned into a creepypasta. The paranoia organized itself, finding a home on Reddit with the birth of r/scottandtomoko. Here, hundreds of users began treating Scott, Tomoko, and Kai not as real people with a right to be forgotten, but as NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) in an investigative game. Digital doxxing and stalking ensued in an attempt to "solve the mystery" of a disappearance that, in reality, never happened.
The story of Scott and Tomoko teaches us that the internet never forgets, even when it should. The Wayback Machine has trapped their private life in an eternal "Liminal Space," an archaeological artifact that terrifies us only because—to our eyes, now addicted to fiction—it was too... real.