Pluralistic: Why Millenials aren’t leaving Tiktok (21 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

9point6, 2 months ago (edited 1 month ago)

Anecdotal sure, but the only millennials I know that use tiktok are either borderline Gen Z or work in social marketing.

Insta seems to be the platform of choice for millennials

Psaldorn, 2 months ago

I just watch a few helldiving clips and recipes every few days, it’s not fucking heroin

schnokobaer, 2 months ago

Millennials are using tiktok?!

stoy, 2 months ago

The youngest millenials are 27-28, that is not how old the average tiktok user I see is.

It sounds like the boomer situation again, were people call older generations boomers as an insult regardless if it is accurate, only the age is reversed

Drusas, 2 months ago

None of my millennial friends use TikTok to begin with. Seems more Gen Z.

colforge, 2 months ago

Counterpoint: I’m 33 and a good portion of my friends my age have TikTok accounts and have sent me videos. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.

Drusas, 1 month ago

Oh sure, this is obviously extremely anecdotal. I am on the closer to Gen X side of millennial, so I'm sure that will impact my experience as well. And then, of course, there are always outliers.

DrCake, 2 months ago

Yeah I’m gen z and very few of my friends have TikTok.

Psychodelic, 2 months ago

Yeah same here. It’s weird to me when someone young is super against using it

colforge, 2 months ago

The hive mind is strong. It’s wild. I see it happen with every single platform all the way back to Facebook showing up after MySpace. Then insta, Snap, Vine, and it’ll just keep happening. I’ll use whatever platform I find entertaining, and TikTok has definitely entertained me.

wesker, 2 months ago (edited 1 month ago)

They aren’t “stranded”, they’re addicted to or rather emotionally reliant on these platforms. It is a choice, you can pull the plug. There’s a world out there.

treeko, 2 months ago

Pick one. It’s either an addiction OR a choice

PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S, 2 months ago

They aren’t “stranded”, they’re addicted to or rather emotionally reliant on these platforms. It is a choice, you can pull the plug.

From the article:

If you’re a Gen Z kid on Tiktok, you experience the same enshittification as your Millennial elders. But you also experience an additional cost to staying: as late-arriving adult authority figures become more fluent in the platform, they are more able to observe your use of it, and punish you for conduct that you used to get away with.

And if you’re a Millennial who isn’t leaving Tiktok, it’s not just that you experience the same enshittification as those departing Gen Z kids – you also face higher switching costs if you go. The older you get, the more complex your social connections grow. A Gen Z kid in middle school doesn’t have to worry about losing touch with their high-school buddies if they switch platforms (they haven’t gone to high school yet – and they see their middle school friends in person all the time, giving them a side-channel to share information about who’s leaving Tiktok and where they’re headed to next). Middle-schoolers don’t have to worry about coordinating little league car-pools or losing access to a rare disease support group.

In other words: younger people leave old platforms earlier because they have more to gain by leaving; and older people leave old platforms later because they have more to lose by leaving.

And as a young millennial/old gen Z guy, I can switch networks with ease because I just don’t personally have any network to lose! I didn’t have any friends on Reddit when I left! And when I left Facebook, I only ever kept in close contact with two people.

Considering the history of the world and the fact that our species is a social one, I don’t think that people clinging to their social network is worth classifying to be an addictive or emotionally reliant behavior. I can tell you from personal experience: not having a social network is a fast-track to a difficult life.

There’s a world out there.

Right, so people leaving a social network would have to reintegrate into some in-person social network. That is seen as a cost to leave their current network.

Literally unless you want to just be alone all your life (which is fine and frankly I sympathize, hence why I’m not making friends on enshittified social networks), you need to go where the people are, even if it sucks, even and especially to do real things in the real world.

Pan_Ziemniak, 2 months ago

This is a great breakdown. Its much like my peers who never left FB: they simply stand to lose the majority of their social exposure that is not work related.