When I look at tiktok my primary reaction isn't "I don't get this, I'm so old" it's "this is a deliberately hostile attention vampire platform and that sucks, the people doing creative shit on here deserve to not be treated like zoo animals by the standard issue fucking tech ghouls running it". Like, I loved Vine and that went away only 7 years ago. I encourage people to push through their immediate and understandable "I'm old" reactions to what specifically bugs them about it. Maybe for some people it is mostly that sense of age-based alienation but there are real critiques to be made, and I get the impression that some people on the platform itself are at the forefront of those crits. (And to them I would say, it's probably not gonna change, sorry! It's a classic for-profit platform capitalist land grab entirely by design and you'll never own it in the way you probably deserve to, so maybe find alternatives before the jaws of death close around it!)
in reply to @Aura's post:
i do think our parents might have faced something similar when "the thing kids are doing" changed from anything they had a mental model for, to hanging out on forums and IRC (which, okay, probably wasn't most teens in our age bracket, but ...)
at the same time, i think sometime after our era, when online became both mainstream and ad-driven, there was a shift to what is now a very aggressive and predatory attention economy that is less interested in the actual service it is providing to its users and more interested in exploiting known human psychology to keep eyeballs on sellable ad spaces, and engagement high and i can't imagine growing up immersed in this stuff from - let's be real, definitely a younger age than the 13 years old or whatever it is COPPA makes you pinky promise you are
in kinda like the same way i wonder what effect it has on a generation of people who primarily know games from predatory mobile F2P titles razor-honed to exploit gambling psychology to extract maximum microtransaction fees from their players
it's definitely a very different media landscape and culture than anything we knew, especially before we hit adulthood
im so sorry i keep adding thoughts to this but it's can't sleep late bird hours, sorry, also i don't want to write this garbage up into a Real Post™ or publicly confronting the mortifying ordeal of aging etc etc...
i do wonder how much better connected we are than prior generations (at least, excepting people who don't work directly with younger folks) just because of generational1 lines blurring somewhat by throwing everyone into the same sites and cross-pollinating posts and videos and memes or whatever
like, i also have no taste for tiktok (which i will refrain from getting too into the weeds about here), but it's not as though i have never seen one, even though i will never seek one out, because they get linked around in other spaces
although i also wonder how much of this lens is distorted by the virality you mentioned - the stuff that leaks out to other spaces is going to be biased to whatever gets big numbers...
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generations are fake but you know what i mean2
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oh no even my chomments have footnotes oh no
I want to point out that older people think the same thing about live music festivals, back in their day there was so much stigma about selling out, not really being there for the art, etc, and now our festivals have so many fucking sponsorships it's ridiculous, some of them almost look like pop up shopping centers that happen to have a stage or two for music hidden somewhere in them, if you read the map right
i think getting into weird niche stuff at a young enough age innoculates you against this feeling going forward bc you can't fall out of touch if you were never particularly "in touch" to begin with
There are good tiktoks, and I'm happy enough seeing them only when they're curated by the tumblrs I follow
I noticed in my early 20s that pop culture takes all of my spoons to stay up to speed on and gives me nothing at all in return, so I've been out of touch since around the time Korn's "Here to Stay" was getting radio play.
I'm missing nothing. Whatever's hot changes every few minutes; whatever manages to make it to mainstream media coverage and last more than a year sounds like garbage to my ears. That's always been the case. I'd rather watch media I like and listen to music I like and my discovery channels for those things are and always have been word of mouth and exploration via imdb, wikipedia, discogs, etc.
It probably doesn't help that I've occasionally had a trauma response to large numbers of people (>2) yelling about a single pop culture topic on social media. If the entries were dated my twitter mute words would probably map cleanly to the twitter zeitgeist.
Since finding Chikn Nugget on YouTube, I don't even bother with the site anymore.
Site is a disease and honestly harmful for ADHD people like myself where I end up fixated for 2-4 hours at a time. Had to uninstall it.
i liked twitter because i could participate? i do not understand the appeal of tiktok, of a constant stream of brief random garbage