[kqcso]

I think the main similarity between TikTok and traditional social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" aspect. Once you've bought in, you see how amazing these peoples' lives are and you want your life to be that great too.

IMO it's all an illusion, but it's not much different from seeing a friend, family member, co-worker. or a prominent business-person/celebrity being more successful than you. The interesting (scary?) thing about TikTok is that it hyper-compresses that environment into a few seconds, then constantly bombards you with it via a neverending flow of videos. It's like keeping up with the Joneses on amphetamines.

[kredd]

Weird part about it, it really depends. The last time I checked, my TikTok feed was just full of funny small videos filmed by random people doing stupid trends outside. Nothing about their lives exactly attracts me. However, the fact that a lot of people see these videos, and I reshare it with my friends and laugh at it together is what can make it remarkable.

Obviously, it heavily depends. I’ve looked at my friends’ feeds and it’s exactly what you’ve described.

[carl_dr]

This is the actual great thing about TikTok. My experience of TikTok seems very different to the majority of the commenters here, it’s like we’re on different platforms.

Obviously we all like different things, and there is enough content to fill everyone’s feeds with it.

[kbenson]

Yeah, the one thing people familiar with TikTok seen to agree on and be impressed by is its ability to cater the content it serves to your desires.

That's actually what got me to try it out. There were multiple cases where I heard that, so downloaded it and spent some time on it. After you've used it a few hours, you start really getting mostly the stuff you like.

You just have to be very careful not to engage with stuff you don't want to see. Scroll away as soon as you've determined it's not for you, as they'll notice if you watch things to the end. I made a conscious decision that I didn't want to engage in content where people were complaining about the behavior of other people and scrolled past as soon as I identified things as such, and I stopped getting them within a few days. My TikTok is all fun/funny stuff.

[barrenko]

I've took on a shitty job recently (which I've since quit) and there were a lot of 40-50-60 y.o men working the said crap job. Some 75% of them are watching Tiktoks during breaks, which I've never seen with Youtube/Insta. You can think of "keeping up with the Joneseses" as a disease or something negative (which I do personally), but it's what a looot of people want to do and live like.

[oarabbus_]

I'm not entirely sure I believe this argument that Tiktok is a different level of addictiveness than "traditional" social media (which IMO is a fake distinction with no fundamental difference to "$NEW" social media, but that's a separate discussion). I'd like to see if any data or studies actually suggests the endless scroll of twitter, facebook, instagram and reddit, or the autoplay of youtube, is less addictive than tiktok.

I've certainly seen friends and family compulsively scroll and obsessively check instagram and snapchat in a manner no different than what people are criticizing about tiktok. It seems like people witness their "their generation" using instagram/snapchat for hours on end; then they see the younger generation using tiktok for (the same number of) hours on end, and get the idea it's far more damaging.

[Gh0stRAT]

I can't seem to find a single site (which would presumably mean a consistent methodology) that lists recent data for average|median use per day for both of them, but I've seen numbers saying people spend 33-50 min per day on Facebook, vs 90+ min per day on TikTok.*

I suspect the curated short video format is what really holds people's attention in a way that is different from "traditional social media".

*disclaimer: as reported by different sites, with different methodologies, and different reporting dates.

[powerapple]

I don't see any of those. I see cooking recipes, some sports, and some standup clips, perfect for me. I don't see any of those content you mentioned.

[jmkd]

Nah. TikTok embraces flaws, problems, doubts, concerns and failures in a way that other social platforms traditonally have not.

[kbenson]

TikTok does in some ways seem like the anti-Instagram or Facebook, or at least my feed does. It's all people using their hardships or quirks as humor and a way to connect, or couples examining the annoyances of marriage and relationships in good humor.

The amount of things I want to and do share with my wife and kids in there makes me thing of the items as small emotional payloads I can send which are themselves a message, sort of like sending an emoji or string of them.