[bgarbiak]

It was cool to smoke when all the cool guys in the movies were smoking. One of the reasons it’s not cool anymore is that the cool guys in the movies don’t smoke nowadays (although they do it more often now than they did ten years ago; which is worrying).

The correlation between an exposure and initiating smoking is proved: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27043456/

[Retric]

Correlation is not causation, vaping didn’t need movies.

[jennyholzer]

Vaping needed social media

[Retric]

Fads long predate social media. Instead social media and vaping came into their own on similar timelines but adoption of vaping just never saw the kind of hockey stick curve you see from a major fad.

Instead it was relatively slow taking ~10 years to hit 25 million users and ~20 years to hit 85 million users keeping it niche vs the ~1,100 million smokers.