>it's not a foregone conclusion that what the world wants is to be mindlessly entertained by the algorithm of a faceless corporation

Not foregone, but not likely to be supplated by high effort individual curation.

Another plus of TikTok is that the only unitary identity is your content posts, rather than, e.g. your comment/post history.

TikTok is the evolution of SnapChat, which fucked up precisely at playing coporate tastemaker with its ephermeral content model. TikTok solved that.