TikTok, the wildly popular social media app that revolves round 15-second video clips, has become a major cultural force. It has birthed chart-topping hits like “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, incubated new subcultures like VSCO girls, and become the default way to goof off at work. But there's a simple facet of the app—which has been downloaded over 1.4 billion times globally—that has received far less attention: It exists outside of time.

Unlike other social media platforms, TikTok is totally stripped of information like when a video was uploaded or the date a user opened their account. The app presents an endless stream of algorithmically chosen videos, which you swipe through vertically. But there's no way to discern when any of them were posted. Tap on a user's profile and their videos will appear in reverse chronological order, but they only display view counts. Sites like Facebook and Twitter prioritize recently uploaded content. But TikTok, named after the sound a clock makes, has no time for time itself—a decision that ripples across the entire platform.

The most obvious byproduct of that choice: TikTok videos that are weeks or even months old—an eternity on the internet—can suddenly go viral, with viewers blind to their age. “It’s cool that older content can still be enjoyed weeks later, but also annoying that instead of seeing new content I see videos from months ago,” says Moria Bryson, a TikTok creator with over 200,000 followers who goes by @mannequindude. “I wouldn’t say it interferes with my content making, but I wish it was easier to tell when videos were posted.”

"I personally had to start commenting on my own videos just so I can truly tell when I posted them." Jessie Sayhey, TikToker

While creators say the absence of time stamps can be frustrating, the design choice almost certainly helps boost engagement for Bytedance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company and one of the highest-valued startups in the world. TikTok's feed is endless, and it's dangerously easy to lose hours watching videos on the app. But the experience is unlike scrolling through Instagram, where signposts remind you that you've delved three years into someone's past. If TikTok gave similar guidance, "that would interrupt our consumption of that endless stream,” says Ben Grosser, a professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the artist behind Demetricator, a tool that strips social media sites of metrics such as likes, shares, and time stamps.

Grosser says his research indicates that users treat older content on social media differently: Anything aged more than two days often isn't worth engaging with. For example, it's now a minor faux pas to comment on someone's Facebook status a week after it was posted—that indicates you weren't paying attention or, worse, went snooping. There's no similar harm in liking a 10-day-old TikTok video, since there's no way to know it was uploaded that long ago.

Grosser also points out that unlike Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook, TikTok prevents users from keeping track of the time by covering the clock displayed at the top of their iPhones. That means TikTok addicts like me can quickly lose track of how many minutes we've spent on the app. To cope, I recently began subconsciously counting time on TikTok’s terms, telling myself things like, I can watch three more videos before going back to work, for example, roughly equivalent to a minute or two. In this way, Grosser says, I came up with my own internal way of measuring time—since the platform declined to provide the ones I usually rely on.

The lack of time on TikTok helps dictate not only how users behave but also what kinds of content can thrive on the app. Time stamps, for example, are an essential part of reporting news. By not having them, TikTok subtly signals to users that it’s not a platform for world events, it’s merely here to “inspire creativity and bring joy,” a far less controversial mission. That ethos is reflected in the media organizations that are on TikTok, like The Washington Post, which almost exclusively posts jokes and sketches for its audience of nearly 150,000 followers, rather than news updates.

Lowering the incentive to post news content also helps TikTok potentially avoid the kinds of scandals that have embroiled other platforms, like accusations of political bias. The company has shown it has few qualms about censoring potentially controversial posts: Moderation guidelines obtained by The Guardian show TikTok staff were instructed to censor topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government, as well as LGBT content in some markets. The company has said the instructions are outdated.