Why do apps think I talk like that?

I think you’ll enjoy this Embedded!

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

This post proudly written by ME.—Kate

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Every group has a “grink”: A collection of inside-jokes-slash-vocabulary that gives the conversations their unique tone. For reasons too convoluted to explain, my group chat’s grinks are phrases like “yayyy” and “so that’s my life!” Like a lot of friend chats it is sarcastic, even nihilistic. And it is the opposite of how every app that auto-generates share text seems to think we talk. 

This bee was put in my bonnet by TikTok which, as of this month, has decided to randomly inflict possibly the worst automatic share text I’ve ever seen on its users.

Whether you share from the app or just drop a link in a chat, TikTok automatically adds this completely unneeded note to the top of the link. Now, it’s “enjoy this post in TikTok,” which is is only marginally better than the abomination that was happening a few weeks prior, seen in the screenshot above. It is clunky and unnatural and, worst of all, appears as a text from me.