On: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

[labrador]

> Now, Tiktok has come along and likely by chance found an even more powerful doom-scroller, the dopamine 9000

I don't think older people who were raised in a longer attention span world (without even flashy jump cuts on TV) will find short attention span videos appealing.

I could be wrong. One thing that would tell me I'm wrong is if there was a robust amount of people over 40 on TikTok. I don't have that data, but Facebook probably does.

Edit: Only a quarter of TikTok users are over 34 years old

https://www.omnicoreagency.com/tiktok-statistics/

[klabb3 → labrador]

I have observed almost the opposite. Sure, younger people are early adoptors but the older folks don't have a natural resistance and are easily hooked. People addicted to Facebook are increasingly middle aged.

That's another reason why I think fb needs to calm their tits and chill out a bit – sure, Tiktok is super popular at the moment but this level of addiction is something I expect younger generations to cope with better. It wouldn't surprise me if the tiktok reign will be short lived.

TV is a good example, because it had a similar effect on hijacking previously unexplored attention mechanisms. It's also a good example because it deteriorated into an irrecoverable ad-hell, yet younger generations found refuge in higher quality substitutes (Netflix etc) and now cable is dying slowly (as they should). Thanks to a modernized and relatively sane approach, tv as a medium is better and makes more money than ever. It speaks to the fact that in the long run, consumers will go elsewhere when giants feed them crap products and – importantly – by the time they do, the giants are unable to keep up.