How to Renovate Your Home for a Billion Children

September 30, 2024:

Along the way, the aesthetic and style of these videos started to change. The early viral renovation videos from Designer Bob were silly but could sometimes be mistaken for genuine design content. Newer videos were more ludicrous, the renovations more fantastical, their action narrated by a droning AI voice. That’s just the way TikTok’s remix culture works, says Alex Turvy, who studies digital culture.

“We’re going to see trends like this become more and more absurd until they burn out,” he says.

There’s even a spin-off meme specifically about “galvanized square steel,” to the point where some users have questioned whether the whole meme is a viral marketing campaign for galvanized steel.

“I think lore is a really good word to use here. Now the videos blow up and do well because there is lore around them,” Karten says. “Lore sustains virality.”

The more I watched these videos, the more desperate I was to understand who was making them. In the case of Designer Bob, the account bio links to an online candle and crystal store run by a company based in China called Whisper Wisp. And the Designer Bob Facebook page lists Hong Kong as a base on the Page Transparency section. Still, it seems unlikely this is a covert marketing campaign for a candle shop. None of Whisper Wisp’s social channels are nearly as popular as the Designer Bob account. (Whisper Wisp didn’t respond to any of my messages.)

Details about who’s behind the Dy02449xjp account are even more scarce. There is a Facebook page with the same username sharing the same videos. Beyond that, nothing. No other connected accounts, no storefronts or identifying information. If there’s a scam or an upsell coming, it hasn’t dropped yet. For now, at least, Dy02449xjp appears to be pursuing TikTok engagement for its own sake.

Many of these accounts use some variation of the name “Home Designs” and similar logos of a small house, which strongly resemble the branding of an architecture and interior design program called HomeDesignsAI—a major clue, I thought, toward solving the mystery. I was able to track down HomeDesignsAI’s COO and cofounder, Denis Madroane. But he was just as confused as everyone else about how popular these renovation TikToks have become.

HomeDesignsAI is a Romania-based startup that launched in 2023. The app allows users to upload a photo of a room or floor plan and transform it using AI. Madroane says he started seeing TikToks that used HomeDesignsAI last year. He says he and his team thought they were pretty funny—but they’re not seeing much upside.

Madroane confirmed that Home-DesignsAI does have a TikTok account, though it doesn’t really participate in the memes. It has a little under 900 followers, and its biggest video has around 195,000 views. Which seems fine—until you compare it to the unofficial Home-DesignsAI accounts on TikTok. The biggest one, @homedesign369, has 2.4 million followers and is consistently getting millions of views per video.

“Our official account is severely underperforming compared to the numbers averaged by user-generated content,” Madroane concedes.

But as it turns out, none of the most viral Little John TikToks were made using HomeDesignsAI software. So, mystery unsolved. And before this summer, no one on TikTok seemed to know where these videos were coming from. That is, until Candise Lin, a Cantonese and Mandarin tutor based in the US, noticed the trend going viral and revealed the missing piece of the puzzle—at least for confused Americans—in a TikTok video of her own.

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