Petty customer dramas are taking over TikTok — driven by an endless appetite for vindication and revenge

• People can't get enough of petty consumer drama on TikTok.
• Etsy sales gone wrong, botched cakes, and rude customers amass millions of views.

Let's face it, we've all gotten way too invested in a dispute that wasn't ours.

Thanks to TikTok, we can do it all the more often — the network's algorithm frequently boosts compelling, low-stakes dramas to be seen by audiences in the millions.

Art sales gone wrong, disappointing birthday cakes, and rude messages from Etsy sellers have all gone viral in recent weeks.

In return for the entertainment, millions of people view these stories, loving the vindication and ability to re-live and right the wrongs of their own past experiences.

"We've all been slighted in some way before," Jess Maddox, an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama, told Insider. "And when we see these things start to play out in real time, it's like, oh, here's my chance."

TikTok's steady stream of drama

In January, a woman called Elisabeth Manente was told curtly to "have the day you deserve" by a store trying to sell her a candle.

It also accused her of having been drunk or high when she ordered a $19 Harry Styles candle, for which she later requested a refund. Manente's TikTok sharing screenshots of the bizarre exchange took off, earning her millions of views.

Similarly, in February, a seller of plastic cups had a public bust-up with a customer in which both sides posted angry TikToks about each other when an item shaped like a Christmas tree cake showed up damaged.

Cassaundra Kalba, the lead publicist and campaign manager and PR and marketing firm Society22 told Insider that short-lived viral stories take over TikTok because of their "relatability to virtually anyone."

"All of us have more than likely felt wronged by a business, or maybe have been in the opposite role in a customer-service position dealing with a less than lovely customer," she said. "These customer dramas evoke emotion from the consumer through relatability and leave a lasting impression and thought in the viewer's mind."

A saga that is now known as "CakeGate" epitomized the appetite for petty drama in April, when baker Kylie Rae Allen decided to upload a video criticizing a recent customer.

This customer, she said, was completely unreasonable in her expectations of an $84 rainbow cake she purchased, and was wrong to complain that the cake was messy and not worth the money.

However, the tide turned on Allen when the customer, Ashleigh Freeman, uploaded her own side of the story and showed the offending cake. Thousands soon agreed the cake was in fact overpriced and scruffy, and started to dig through Allen's social media history for any evidence that she was a liar and a fraud.

Maddox, the journalism professor, told Insider that CakeGate demonstrated the "call-out culture" that has been cultivated on TikTok in particular, where people love to be the "first" to the news.

"People love pulling a fast one on somebody or proving they've done something wrong, like an 'aha got you' moment," she said. "So if you've got, quote unquote, a scoop, or can indicate somebody isn't who they say they are, then you can draw attention to yourself in a way."

Baruch Labunski, an SEO analyst and the founder of the marketing agency Rank Secure, said we like to watch other people's mess because it takes our minds off our own problems.

"It's the 'at least I'm not that guy' syndrome," he said. "It's a distraction that people seem to need today."

Complete authenticity, nothing less

The majority of people following CakeGate thought that Allen, the baker, misrepresented the situation when she called Freeman "the worst customer" she'd ever had,

This broke the invisible contract between poster and watcher, Maddox said, in that they're supposed to be authentic.

"We had a social-media creator being called out for lying," she said. "Which is very clearly a breach of authenticity on their part."

The pile-on Allen received was fairly extreme, Maddox said. People flooded Yelp with negative reviews and scrolled through her Facebook page to find more evidence she was a bad or untrustworthy person.

"People want to join the crowd to either comment on or find more evidence of insincerity or being inauthentic," Maddox said. "It's this very interesting mob mentality of, oh, well if the person lied about this, what else have they lied about?"

The most recent turn of events to have people hooked has been labeled "TattooGate." It concerns a woman named Courtney Monteith who believes she was charged around $1,600 for a concept sketch of a fox by an artist that she ended up never getting due to excessive design and consultation fees.

Monteith told her story in a series of videos which ended up blowing up (the first video amassed over 5 million views), saying the sketch was nothing like what she asked for.

While she never named the tattoo studio, TikTok, being full of sleuths, found it within minutes and tanked the artist's Google reviews (Google has since removed the reviews). Other people have also come forward accusing the artist of similar things.

The flames of CakeGate had barely died down before TattooGate became the latest drama on everyone's feed. It's part of what keeps us coming back, Maddox said.

"What makes TikTok so interesting and exciting and entertaining for people is that they never know what they're gonna be exposed to next," she said. "People are complex, they live complex lives, they make mistakes. And unfortunately we live in an era where mistakes are lived very publicly at the moment."