The youth exodus from #TikTok is already underway. Gen Z is abandoning it in droves, leaving their parents (Millennials) the largest demographic remaining.
As usual, children seek to hang out in places their parent's generation are not. TikTok lost that a while ago.
"If you don't like it, why don't you take your business elsewhere?" It's the motto of the corporate apologist, someone so Hayek-pilled that they see every purchase as a ballot cast in the only election that matters - the one where you vote with your wallet.
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The biggest reason for staying with a bad company is if they've figured out a way to punish you for leaving. Businesses are keenly attuned to ways to impose #SwitchingCosts on disloyal customers. "Switching costs" are all the things you have to give up when you take your business elsewhere.
Businesses love high switching costs - think of your gym forcing you to pay to cancel your subscription or Apple turning off your groupchat checkmark when you switch to Android.
This week on my #podcast, I read "Let the Platforms Burn," a recent @medium column making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
For most of the history of consumer tech and digital networks, fire was the norm. New platforms - PC companies, operating systems, online services - would spring up and grow with incredible speed, only to collapse, seemingly without warning.
The classic trilemma goes: "Fast, cheap or good, pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma goes, "Large, diverse userbase; centralized platforms; don't anger users - pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma is introduced in "Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media," a superb paper from @arozenshtein U of Minnesota Law, forthcoming in the journal Free Speech Law, available as a prepub on SSRN:
A decade later, Musk performed the same stunt, asking users whether they wanted him to fuck all the way off from the company, then ignored the #VoxPopuli, which, in this instance, was not #VoxDei:
Facebook, Twitter and other #WalledGardens are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high #SwitchingCosts to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls.