[rtev]

TikTok is happy, Facebook optimized for outrage and conflict.

When you only get shown stuff that pisses you off, you’ll get some short-term high engagement at the cost of enjoyment. Ultimately, that gave the strong impression that Facebook is Thanksgiving with your racist uncle, so young people dropped out.

[hbn]

I can't imagine how you could possibly think Facebook is the only platform that optimizes for outrage and conflict. That's the entire social media MO. People certainly do not leave platforms that make them angry. Making people angry generates the most engagement out of anything. Twitter makes people miserable and it seems to be doing just fine.

Young people were already leaving Facebook since the early 2010s because their parents were all making accounts, making it less of a "safe" place to express themselves, and all the moms and grandmas just got left there. So Facebook's core, active user demographic became an older generation that skews more conservative, so the outrage porn that circulates there leans in that direction.

Whereas every other mainstream platform on the internet has the young people who are more liberal and hate the older generation, so the outrage porn shared around there is about how everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi and how a straight white guy said something fatphobic. And if you're a person into that kind of stuff, that's what your Tiktok feed will be. It's certainly not "happy" unless you train the algorithm to only show you that.

It's 2 flavors of equally stupid anger bait to get people refreshing their feed all day. But it's certainly not that people have collectively decided they want happier news feeds. Quite the opposite.