In grade school before the internet, this occurred through physical products. My first grade trend was Yo Yo (Yomega, Brainstorm, Duncan), second grade Pokemon trading cards (Digimon, Magic, Yu Gi Oh), third grade finger skateboards (TechDeck), fourth and fifth segways into middle school when social systems are developing so its clothes brand trend pursuit which is when I checked out because video games were starting to get interesting.
Phones and Xanga/Myspace arrived roundabout when I got my driver's license.
I'm sure there were similar toy brand trends pre-covid when kids were still seeing each other every day and sharing physical toys.
TikTok released some official report the other day in compliance with whatever legal motions were recently filed, and it keeps saying the word "clusters" when referring to users.
I guess it's just yet another company that wants to compete over access to "clusters" of users aged 12-35 (that's the widest age range I would expect to be concerned with the latest communication app offering that enables the exact same utility they already had with Vine/Snap/Tik).
is there something unique about how tiktok is doing it?
You can do a lot of things wrong if you reach that position, and still keep your place.
People will reference MySpace as a counter to that. Except MySpace was never close to being entrenched, they had no moat or stake in the ground. They never had all the world's celebrities and politicians on their platform, using it as a core broadcast method to the world.
At their peak in 2006-2007, MySpace's monthly active users measured in the tens of millions. Certainly very large for its time, however as a general purpose social network meant to pursue max scale, MySpace contrasted against Facebook demonstrates just how dramatically far away from entrenched-scale MySpace really was (they got maybe 10%-20% of the way there).
To put it into perspective, Cristiano Ronaldo's following on Instagram is as big as MySpace at its peak. Now that's an entrenched max audience social network in action.
MySpace was too early, before there were enough global users to even be able to obtain that level of necessary entrenchment protection. Their network - for its specific purpose - was small enough that it was still quite possible to unseat them. Facebook's boom phase also coincided perfectly with the rise of the modern app smartphone beginning in 2007-2008, which ultimately brought the Internet to a dramatically larger audience around the world (and was responsible for enabling Facebook to reach three billion users; without the smartphone that would either never happen or would have taken several more decades).
I reference the type or purpose aspect because obviously not all social networks are max scale general purpose networks. Twitter's potential base isn't three billion users, as that many people will never want to use the platform under any circumstances. Each type of social network has a max potential userbase (Pinterest's max base is different from LinkedIn's which is different from Facebook's). Twitter has likely heavily (not entirely) saturated their maximum reach and long since gotten to the required entrenchment scale for what they particularly do.
I think Twitter was incompetent when trying to make it a business.
It’s the Minecraft effect. Just because a person or organization hits it huge once doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing and will be able to repeat success.
As a business, Twitter should be far more profitable than they are, their profit margin is 1/3 that of Facebook at the same level of sales (2011 for Facebook), despite having 1/2 the number of users that Facebook had at that point time.
If it does well enough to be self-sustainable then I consider that a success. Not everything has to be Silicon Valley level stratospheric.
Vine was nothing like TikTok. The editing tools of TikTok are vastly superior and lead to much higher quality videos with higher probability of being worth watching.
Vine was mostly shitty little 6 second clips of meme like content. Good for some laughs, but ultimately vapid and shallow. By the time they even wanted to experiment with longer format content they were done.
That’s not even mentioning cultural differences.
Isn't this what Tiktok is? I thought it was mostly tweens dancing and lip syncing.
But people love the subreddits for their interests.
There's no way to make a single front-page that everyone likes.
An example of the good stuff you can run across on TikTok is this lady:
https://www.tiktok.com/@arizonagypsy
Roughly, she made some videos lamenting the phenomenon of how her children and grandchildren have ~"forgotten" her, despite the fundamentally important role she played in their life in the past.
I couldn't find the original video (why can't you sort by date posted!!!???), but these give you an approximate idea:
https://www.tiktok.com/@arizonagypsy/video/68683101136402874...
https://www.tiktok.com/@arizonagypsy/video/68683779147448517...
I think it would be fair to say she has a feeling of not being wanted/valued, not being useful in the complex new world we've created. Something like that.
Well as it turns out, these posts seem to have struck a chord with a fair amount of people (35.8K Followers, 396.5K Likes), and she now fairly regularly does live streams (she was initially extremely hesitant, because she didn't really see why people would want to watch, which is somewhat paradoxical to her original complaint) with >100 (last time I watched) people watching who just ask her random questions and she answers them. Everyone seems to get something out of it: she now has a genuine purpose and value in life, and viewers have the opportunity to ask questions for which the answers cannot be found on the internet, if they're even there at all.
I personally think this is a form of Magick[1], and I mean that not only unironically, but I think this is what we need to get us out of the absolute mess we've created on this planet. Education, logic and critical thinking, which we're not nearly as good at as we perceive, doesn't seem like it's anywhere near up to a task this large.
[1]
It’s very easy to conduct this experiment, just make sure that the race you target doesn’t represent the majority of the users in your proximity. For instance, if you’re in Norway then try to get TikTok to recommend Asian girls aged 20-35.. sounds like it should be easy, right?