When Carlmont freshman Declan Lai posted a short clip of himself camping in Yosemite, he expected a few close friends to watch it, not 30 million people.
The 14-second-long video, posted on Lai’s Instagram account in early July, showed Lai with his friends in a tent in the rain, where he excitedly exclaimed that they were camping in Yosemite National Park. After recording the video, Lai continued the trip with his phone’s cell service off.
“Two days later, I opened Instagram, and it said I had 560,000 views,” Lai said. “It just kept growing from there.”
In recent years, short-form content platforms such as YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and especially TikTok have transformed how people share content and the entertainment industry as a whole.
“TikTok has been revolutionary because it created the idea of a recommendation algorithm,” said Jason McDonald, a social media analyst.
Recommendation engines, or social media algorithms, decide the videos shown to social media users. Each platform has a different algorithm that tracks certain factors to determine what users see.
“Companies started to figure out that you wanted to encourage engagement,” McDonald said.
Engagement is measured through likes, shares, comments, and watch time. The algorithm identifies videos with strong engagement and can be shown to a wider audience.
While engagement metrics are a key factor in social media algorithms, they are just one part of a complex system.
“Going viral was mostly luck,” Lai said.
Beyond engagement metrics, content that evokes emotions tends to perform well in the algorithm. According to a study by Rosanna Guadagno titled “What Makes a Video Go Viral? An Analysis of Emotional Contagion and Internet Memes,” videos that elicit strong emotions are more likely to be shared and perform well as a result.
The study was performed by showing a group of people videos that were considered cute, funny, disgusting, anger-inducing, and boring. The study found that boring videos were the least likely to be shared, while funny and cute videos were the most likely to be shared.
McDonald also finds that emotional content is more successful.
“Emotional content is the driving force for most consumer content,” McDonald said. “That has all sorts of ramifications for our whole culture, because everything is moving towards emotion and away from reason.”
Lai believes that the reason his video went viral was that it sparked a positive reaction in viewers.
“What really set my video up to go viral was how a lot of people were impressed because, for once, they were seeing kids that weren’t on their phones,” said Lai.
Parker Reyes, a Carlmont student and Lai’s friend, thinks differently.
“I think Declan’s video went viral because he has a big friend group,” Reyes said. “It probably got shared along there and grew from there.”
For Lai, going viral has come with its advantages and disadvantages.
“All my life, I’ve been searching for a bunch of friends, and when I was younger, attention,” Lai said. “I guess younger me would be going crazy.”
The attention has made Lai more self-conscious about his everyday actions.
“It’s made me notice that someone’s always watching, and they see the good and the bad,” Lai said.
Despite the sudden fame, Lai remains focused on what truly matters to him. He plans to use his internet fame to promote good causes, like donations to charity.
“If my video didn’t go viral, but I made a bunch of friends along the way, then I’d be fine,” Lai said.
