Pietro Sartori, an Italian content creator known on TikTok as @liscaditonno, says the platform works nothing like people assume. "TikTok isn't Instagram or YouTube," he explains. "People live on the For You page, not their following feed. Every video is judged on its own, almost regardless of who posted it."

Sartori has seen this firsthand. Despite averaging over 380,000 views per video, with several videos reaching 2 to 5 million views, he says a single weak video can still flop to just 200 views, even with 100,000 followers behind it. "This happens to creators with millions of followers too," he says. "On Instagram or YouTube, your existing audience cushions a bad post. On TikTok, it doesn't. Nobody is safe from a low-effort video underperforming."

He also dismisses the idea that posting frequency drives success. Sartori himself has sometimes posted just once a month, and has gone a year or more without posting at all before returning to it more seriously. "The myth that you need to post three times a day doesn't hold up," he says. "You can post once a year, and if it's a genuinely strong video, it will still perform."

He also pushes back on the idea of "shadowbanning." According to Sartori, it's rarely real. "If a video gets 200 views, it's not some hidden algorithm punishment, it's just not good enough yet."

The only thing that reliably matters, he says, is watch time. "If you don't hook someone in the first few seconds and keep them watching until the end, nothing else saves the video." His approach centers on three principles: showing audiences something they've genuinely never seen before, creating a natural trigger for debate in the comments, and structuring content so viewers have to watch until the end to see the outcome.

Sartori continues to post regularly on TikTok, applying this approach to content built around real-world testing and consumer curiosity.