[mikepurvis]

How do you suppose Tiktok fits into all this? On the one hand, it's still a glamorous best-of reel, but it's also a lot more silliness, with sketch comedy and various remix formats (lipsync, duet, etc) being a big thing, not to mention significant subcommunities posting earnestly about topics like self esteem, mental health, etc (and with the needed community-management tools to enable the resulting discussion to not just become a Twitter-style free for all).

I'm not a super active user, but as an observer, I do wonder if much of it is pushing those same buttons but in a perhaps more subtle way— like a lot of "wellness" creators who cultivate an apparently authentic persona from which to deliver a never ending stream of motivational you're-worth-it type content meant to encourage and uplift, but that ultimately rings a bit hollow.

[bentcorner]

I think community plays a huge part. I'm not a tiktok user but I get the impression that a lot of the early tiktok users were heavily creative users. It's like a flywheel.

As these sites/services gain more popularity communities tend to splinter and it's up to the service to keep things going in whatever direction they want to via things like the fyp algorithm.