I was scrolling on my phone the other day and came across this clip.

It’s a video of a girl aggressively slapping herself in the face for no apparent reason. I was rightly confused, and a little disturbed.

So I did what I could to figure out what that was. I checked the video’s description, the comment section, even the creator’s homepage, but found nothing that clarified the situation.

The comment section was especially unhelpful. People were just trolling and making memes there. Some were funny, I suppose, but none helped.

So eventually I gave up and kept on scrolling, but I guess the algorithm had interpreted my action of checking the description and the comments as engagement. As a result it now thought that I really enjoyed seeing people slapping themselves in the face, and began recommending more of them to me.

So suddenly I started seeing all these different women slapping themselves in the face, and I didn’t know why.

By the time I saw it for the 5th time, I decided to just stop scrolling and go do some proper research on the subject. This video is a result of that effort.

Now it turns out that this is indeed a real trend. It looks like an emergent phenomenon on Chinese social media, particularly Douyin, which is the Chinese version of TikTok.

It’s unclear when this trend first began, but the earliest report I found about it was in September of last year. The report describes the story of a Douyin streamer who slapped themselves for three days straight and gained 15,000 followers. It became a kind of modern legend, and inspired waves of imitations.

At present there is a long list of hashtags related to this trend. The most obvious one is #扇巴掌, which literally translates to slapping, with the ‘face’ being the implied target.

At the time of that report, this hashtag had over 20,000 participants and 400 million views. It now has nearly 800 million views.

Now for context, slapping people’s faces for content is not new for social media or entertainment in general.

We’ve all seen actors slap each other on TV and in films. There’s also the slap competition where people do it for sports.

On Chinese social media, face slapping is sometimes used as a transition insert. There’s also a musical dance trend where you slap your face along with other body parts like a percussion instrument. Someone even made a tier list for this stuff. The most successful creator in this niche has almost 4 million followers.

But in all of these cases, face slapping is used as part of an entertainment format. It may be absurd, it may not be your cup of tea, but the purpose of the slapping is intelligible as part of the act.

What makes this slapping trend different is that the slapping here seems to serve no contextual purpose at all. There is no obvious narrative, joke, or performance that you can identify. As an audience, you are left confused as to why this person in the clip is slapping themselves repeatedly.

Now this state of confusion is very much intentional. It’s one of the reasons why this format works.

When a viewer sees a clip and finds it strange, they’ll want to figure out what’s going on. So they’ll check the caption and the comments, and the creator’s homepage, etc. to try to make sense of this. Except that it won’t work. Especially the comment section, it’s mostly full of memes and jokes instead of explanations, because apparently it’s more fun to troll people than to help them. So a viewer can spend a long time lingering around the clip to try to understand it, only to become more confused.

Except that from the algorithm’s perspective, the algorithm doesn’t know that you are confused. It just sees you lingering around the clip, engaging with the captions and the comments and so on. So it starts to think that this content must be very good to inspire this level of engagement. So it pushes the clip to more people. That’s how these clips go viral.

In that sense, the format functions almost like a hack on the algorithm’s recommendation system. And it does so by weaponizing viewer confusion.

Now this trick doesn’t work every time. Not every self-slapping clip goes viral. But that’s not a big problem when the cost of taking a shot is near zero. And that is the other thing that makes this format work: it is unbelievably easy to produce.

You see people have certainly done stranger things on social media to get views. But most forms of content creation have some barriers to entry.

To make a TikTok dance video, you need to learn the dance, which requires effort and practice. To produce a vlog of your day you need to understand enough about storytelling and film production to turn your day into an engaging story that people would want to watch. Even if you are making thirst bait, you still need to be good-looking, which is a rare trait that not everyone has.

But slapping yourself in the face, well that might be one of the few formats of content creation that really does collapse the barrier to entry all the way down to pretty much nothing. You don’t need to be beautiful or funny or charismatic or talented. You don’t need to become good at anything at all.

If you have enough motor function to hold your phone in front of your face long enough to scroll on TikTok, then you have the skill to record yourself slapping your face, and post that clip onto TikTok.

If there is any barrier to entry left at all, it is probably ‘willingness’. In other words, almost anyone can do this, but not everyone is willing to do it.

So how badly do you want a chance at visibility? Do you want it bad enough to slap your own face? If so, then you are in. Welcome to content creation. You are now an influencer.

In this sense the self-slapping trend serves as a raw measurement of how badly one wants a chance at visibility.

But that is an inversion of what sane and sustainable content creation is.

You see as a content creator, the algorithm is outside of your control. For any particular piece of content that you release, you never know exactly how much the algorithm will push it. That part is more or less up to chance.

But that is fine, because sustainable content creation does not depend on that. If you want to make content for the long term, you would probably try to build an audience. By consistently producing something of value, over time, you attract a community of people who appreciate what you make, and would come back to engage with it. That’s one of the ways to exit the rat race of the algorithm.

This self-slapping trend, however, is doing the opposite. It aggressively tries to opt into the rat race in a way that is almost comical.

Obviously no one is expecting to build an audience by slapping themselves in the face. So this is just gaming the algorithm to go viral for its own sake.

Since the only thing that they are engaging with is the possibility of virality, the process begins to resemble a lottery.

I first saw this analogy in an article, where when you slap yourself in the face, it is as if you are scratching off a lottery ticket. Whether you win is up to chance, the algorithm decides that. But given how easy it is to produce these clips, the lottery ticket is basically free. So long as you are willing, you can keep playing, until you win.

Now there is an interesting psychological dimension to this that is worth considering even in success.

Let’s say you win the algorithmic lottery: you slap yourself and get millions of views.

Sure you went viral, but at what cost?

You see online metrics have distorted our sense of scale. We are used to seeing hundreds of thousands, or millions of views for online content, such that these numbers have become abstractions to us. We no longer appreciate the mind-numbing scale that they represent in real life.

Here’s what one hundred people look like. Most of us have a good intuition about this size. Now here’s a thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand, and 1 million.

By the time we get to a million people, that is more than 10 times the size of an Eras Tour Taylor Swift concert, and larger than the populations of many countries on Earth.

It’s mind-numbingly large. There’s nothing casual about this scale. When something you put out gets millions of views, you have incurred a non-trivial degree of impact on the world. What does it mean when that impact takes the form of you slapping yourself in the face?

I don’t know what it means. I’m not the one slapping myself in the face here. Whoever’s slapping themselves in the face, they should consider this before they upload that video.

If your video goes viral, which is what you think you want, think about the implication. Do you really want a million people to see you slap yourself in the face?

If you succeed, it’s likely that more people will have seen you slap yourself in the face than anything your ancestors ever did in their entire lives.

Unless you later go on to do something genuinely impressive, meaningful, or valuable at a similar scale, more people would have seen you slap yourself than will ever see anything else you go on to do. There is a real chance that this will remain the largest impact you’ll leave on the world.

Just you slapping yourself in the face? That would be your legacy.

Now I’m not going to judge. There could be some hidden meaning behind this project that I’m missing here. But you should probably consider this before you upload this clip of you slapping yourself in the face in front of millions of people.