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Some TikTok users go viral by complaining about the city. New Yorkers have had enough.
By
Precious Fondren
Published Dec 23, 2023
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By
Precious Fondren
Published Dec 23, 2023
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Complaining about signing a lease in East Flatbush.
Ranting about the expensive clothes you won’t wear on the subway.
Whining about how you have a great job, boyfriend and apartment — and still don’t like the city.
These are some of the ways New Yorkers have gone viral online in the past year.
Another thing they had in common? They’d all moved to the city from elsewhere – making them “transplants,” as the city's new arrivals are known on TikTok.
When transplant Nimay Ndolo uploaded multiple videos to TikTok after signing a lease for a place in East Flatbush in September, one got over 1 million views.
“You wonder why I hate my life,” she said to the camera. “It's making my life a living hell. All my commutes to get anywhere, even to Williamsburg, are an hour.”
“I basically live in Canarsie,” she yelled, adding that she was “in the middle of nowhere, in a fourth-floor walkup without a couch.”
As the video spread across sites like TikTok and X, the site formerly known as Twitter, thousands of comments flooded in. On X, it got more than 7 million views, with thousands of people resharing it.
Kimberly Ndubizu, known on Tiktok as @SliimKim, said she has to be OK with people disagreeing with her on the Internet.
“Please please stop moving to nyc!!!!” urged one reply.
Ndolo’s video is part of a genre unto itself on TikTok: transplants with hot, usually negative takes about living in New York City.
These videos can receive thousands of interactions and generate their own “response videos,” known on TikTok as “stitches.”
People in videos rant about how there isn’t much to do in the city but go out for drinks and dinner. Another transplant complained about the lack of a Whole Foods in the Bronx – and wound up getting fired after accusations of racism.
In early December, TikTok user Sliimkim found herself in the center of a viral storm, after posting a video about being unable to dress in her expensive clothing on the subway out of a fear that she'll get robbed.
“I am deathly afraid of the men underground,” she said in the one-minute clip that amassed over 4.5 million views on X. “I don't even wear a bag anymore. I don't want to get robbed. I don't wear my watch anymore. I don't want to get robbed.”
SliimKim, whose real name is Kimberly Ndubizu, also said she couldn’t bring a Chanel bag on the train for fear that she’d get “robbed, beat or snatched.”
Predictably, outrage ensued.
“This is deeply embarrassing. Millions of people take the subway every day … with their legs exposed, with jewelry all over, and they aren’t getting robbed,” one user said on X, while resharing Ndubizu’s video.
Ndubizu, who runs a podcast called Rich Little Brokegirls, said the video was meant to be a joke.
She moved to New York City from Washington, D.C. five years ago. She said she'd been harassed on the subway a number of times in the past, but had eventually learned to become “stoic” or “invisible” when on the train.
Grace Johnson, who has lived in NYC since childhood, has made videos rebutting claims by transplants.
Photo by Tariq Kidwai / Courtesy of Grace Johnson
She said she recorded that infamous video right before going out for dinner. She’d wanted to wear heels but changed her mind, then decided to record her video.
“It was really meant to highlight this daily struggle of trying to be invisible on the subway and not be too flashy with all the glitz and glam,” she said in a phone interview. “My sense of humor is very satirical and hyperbolic, and that obviously did not go over well with native New Yorkers, and I think it came across as pretentious.”
But why did so many people care what a relatively unknown person on social media has to say about New York City?
Karen North, a professor who teaches classes on digital social media at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, said one reason the videos of people complaining about the city garner so much attention is because they are often airing frustrations that people may have, but feel they are supposed to keep to themselves.
A video like Ndolo’s, in which she complains about how far her apartment is from public transportation, can be “engaging for all of us around the country, because she's speaking out and amplifying something that we're all feeling,” said North. “But for the people who live there and get upset, they think, ‘Who are you to complain about this community that we call home?’”
Isra Ali, a clinical assistant professor who teaches classes on social media at NYU's Steinhardt School, said another reason these videos go viral is because outrage is a goldmine for engagement.
“Those videos are really effective in the attention economy because they drive emotion from two different camps and it becomes a self-generating sort of content producer,” she said.
“People are making stitches, people are posting about it, people are responding,” Ali said. "The attention economy doesn't place any value on good content versus bad content or good emotion versus bad emotion.”
Ali said these videos tend to spark so much conversation online because they purposely solicit discourse to some degree.
“When we see things, we're sort of encouraged to say, what is your position on this?” she said. “And people feel the need to say, 'This is my position and I stand with this camp versus that camp.'”
She said such discourse existed long before social media, but it happened more in-person. Now, social media gives people far more reach.
“Social media is a place where you can just film a video as something is happening as you're walking down the street and just throw it up there,” she said.
Grace Johnson, who’s lived in New York City since she was 9, made videos responding to some transplants.
Her videos have garnered thousands of views, comments, and shares. One video she made defending the city got more than 700,000 views.
Johnson said her biggest gripe with the videos is what she sees as the sense of entitlement the transplants seem to have about a city they presumably moved to willingly.
“But then there's also the tone deafness,” she said. “You are speaking on issues that other people have been organizing around for years.”
Johnson said she’d like to see transplants and influencers with large followings draw attention to solutions, or to platform organizers who better understand these issues.
Ndubizu, the TikTok user known as Sliimkim, said she’s seen the backlash against her video, though she’s unfazed by it.
She’s even doubled down on her position, recording another video defending her stance.
Ndubizu said that as someone with “a voice on the internet,” she has to be OK with people disagreeing with her.
“I understand that when people see a small clip or a video of you, they take it for face value, they don't understand the nuance,” she said. “You just have to take it on the chin and keep moving forward. I'm not going to crawl into a dark hole because people did not agree with me.”
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Precious Fondren
Precious is a former WNYC & Gothamist culture reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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