If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are you’ve stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll one night this summer. For me it started with two videos somewhat incongruously tagged #homeremodeling and #housedesign. One of them featured a CGI man summoning a baby phoenix outside of a tree that he planned to turn into an apartment. Then a robotic AI voice started to narrate how the CGI man, identified as “Little John,” was going to build it. Over the next 90 seconds, Little John transformed the tree into a maniacally space-efficient luxury unit in an AI-generated ballet of flying galvanized square steel, ecofriendly wood veneer, and expansion screws.
The other video, featuring nearly identical CGI and the same hypnotically flat AI narrator, followed the story of a couple with a billion children that, like Little John, decided it was time to improve their home. And those two videos were only the tip of the galvanized steel iceberg.
There are hundreds of accounts posting these videos to TikTok right now, and they’ve become immensely popular, racking up millions of views. Even the “character” of Little John has become a meme of his own, with people making skits where they pretend to be him.
The videos struck me as a fascinating case study of how TikTok trends have evolved—or rather devolved—over time. What was once an app full of human beings making content in conversation with each other has become a dizzying world where irony and sincerity, memes and spam, blur together into a slurry of bizarre content no one is quite sure what to do with. As I set out to discover who was making these videos, I assumed that lifting the rock would reveal an even stranger world of broken social networks, AI content farms, and shady engagement hacks, wiggling just beneath the surface of the web. Which it did! But stranger still, in the end, it turned out these videos hadn’t become huge as a TikTok trend at all.
In 2022, an account popped up on TikTok called @designer_bob. From the start, it exclusively posted videos with a specific format: Some kind of weird domestic issue must be solved with extreme home renovation, the action animated in a surreal CGI style with a spunky stock music soundtrack. Within a month, the account had a viral hit: a video about designing a bedroom for four children, which has been viewed more than 10 million times.
Designer Bob’s formula proved perfect for TikTok’s algorithm, which is constantly analyzing, in microseconds, what catches your attention and recalibrating to what it thinks you want to watch. There’s a hypnotic quality to these videos. “The storyline is just fucked up enough to grab your attention early on,” says social media analyst Rachel Karten. And because there’s a process happening—a home renovation—the user can’t look away.
Once Designer Bob’s videos started going viral, hundreds of other accounts started posting similar content. One account called @dy02449xjp, which had been sharing clips from 2000s romcoms like The Proposal and Two Weeks Notice, switched over to weird home renovations in January 2024. That same month, one of their videos went exceptionally viral. It’s been watched more than 44 million times.
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.
It turns out we haven’t actually been watching videos made by TikTok users. They’re coming from a completely different app. As Lin explains, these videos come from Bilibili, China’s closest equivalent to YouTube. On Bilibili, Little John is known as 大壮, or Big John. “Galvanized steel” is even a trending search term. According to Lin, there are two Bilibili users known for creating this kind of content, an account called 疯狂设计家, or Crazy Designer, and another called 设计师王姨, or Designer Aunt Wang. I was able to find dozens of other accounts, as well.
The unhinged home renovation videos on TikTok are machine-translated versions of videos from Bilibili. Chinese content makes the jump across the Great Firewall like this fairly often. Videos downloaded from TikTok’s sister app Douyin are a regular presence on TikTok. But the fact that these were not made for English-speaking audiences would explain the robotic narrator, bizarre syntax, and Chinese iconography seen throughout.
After digging through Crazy Designer’s videos, I was able to find one of the videos I had come across on TikTok back in June, about a couple designing a house for a billion children. Crazy Designer titled it “One Billion Children per Room,” and it’s part of a series, all with titles like “A Million Children per Room,” “Two Million Children per Room,” and so on. After watching it on Bilibili and reading the comments underneath it, I started to realize what these videos are: They’re shitposts. This jaundiced real-estate porn is meant to satirize the housing crunch in cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the commenters are all in on the joke.
In the end, it appears there isn’t any kind of scam or engineered marketing stunt here after all. It’s just two cultures laughing at the same uncanny user-generated content, filtered through some perfunctory layers of AI translation and lost context. And according to Lin, Bilibili users are now aware of how popular Little John videos have become in the West. They’re mortified that Americans are watching.
