People have said this about every social media app that became major for the past 10 years dude, Snapchat, Insta, TikTok, etc. If anything the batting average for social media companies that "make it" in the public's mind over the past decade is actually pretty good despite the field being heavily advantaged to incumbents by default. Snapchat is arguably the "least cool" on this list today and it still recorded MAUs in the 100 millions. TikTok ain't going anywhere.

More broadly, it turns out that once you are a company with access to billions of dollars, you will utilize that advantage to stay afloat. People still have some idea that if a business is outmanuevered/outgunned by a competitor, they will close down honorably, and that because teens are fickle they'll move on, etc, and this is all super unpredictable and unquantifiable and there's definitely not entire departments (with budgets as large as the GDP of Latin American countries) designed to account for this. You know, like the OP's leaks show Facebook has. Those rules might be true for your little mom and pop business, for your silly little thing. But not for these kinds of companies that can do an arms race for eyeballs to stay afloat, and they do not engage in the same rules as you.

You can rest assured, no matter how much it upsets you, that TikTok will be almost certainly be around longer in its current form than like 95% of the code written by people using this forum today, including your own.

TikTok and Snapchat are fad social networks. They provide communication channels of a specific format that is very "now," and will almost certainly be supplanted down the line. Will they ever disappear? Probably not, but then again people still send old fashioned telegrams, so I'm not sure disappearing is the metric we care about.

Yeah, just like FB and Instagram /s

Given that the trove of FB documents repeatedly talk about concern of loss of engagement among the youth, the conventional wisdom of 2005 that FB has an inherent lifespan because no one wants to be on a social network with their parents, seems to be playing out.

Sure the "three year" timespan is dumb. FB grew way beyond fad, but the predicted generational dynamics didn't magically go away. In fact, it seems like that hypothesis is playing out. What the real question is, can FB buy another hot social network, before they lose both money and skill.

Even Yahoo was dominate in multiple spaces once.

More like Vine, or MySpace.

Cherry picking examples is not a good argument

I don't know. I'm practically a Luddite when it comes to social networks, and I've started consuming tiktok content quite a bit lately.

I think the best way to describe it is in relation to twitter, which I use heavy for 2-3 days in a row once every few months. Twitter exposes my to lots of interesting things, but ultimately is depressing because of how everyone is so shrill and unwilling to give the benefit of a doubt, and interactions feel hollow.

Tiktok is just pure entertainment, and rarely do I not come way in a better mood. It's like they took r/videos and r/gifs and distilled them into their core components and deliver them through a fire hose.

Will they be gone in a few years? Maybe, but I doubt it. Whatever they're doing it's working and makes me feel better and happier when I use it, so that's a win.

I’ve tried Tiktok on 3 separate occasions. No matter what interests I select when getting started, 95% of the posts it shows me are nearly naked women.

The whole platform seems to be just a means of getting kids hooked on porn. Not once did any post show up based on my interests.

Maybe I’m just too old to figure it out but I couldn’t find any way to get out of endless posts like that.

It took 2-3 days (probably about an hour of browsing) before it started giving me consistently interesting things. Tiktok has been getting a lot of press lately for how good their algorithm is, and specifically how good it is compared to other social networks, presumably because they have so many more interactions to go on. The trick is that it's not entirely (or even mostly? not sure) driven by likes, it's driven by viewing time. If you don't like something, flick it away and on to the next thing.

> The whole platform seems to be just a means of getting kids hooked on porn.

I don't see anything like that anymore. You know what I see? Science teachers doing cool experiments with physics and chemicals. Makers making cool things in a montage. That guy that does animal facts in funny ways. Dog and cat videos. Comedy.

Apparently commenting on a post will indicate interest too? I know I've seen a comment that said "commenting so I end up on $something-tok", because there's a bunch of sub-tiktoks that people end up on because they've been identified as liking that type of content. It's not exactly something that's easily manually indicated from what I've seen, but it seems to happen well organically.

> Maybe I’m just too old to figure it out but I couldn’t find any way to get out of endless posts like that.

Just bypass them as soon as you identify them as something you aren't interested in. Soon enough you should see things that are more to your liking.

Thanks for the tips, honestly.

I just don’t know that I want to give them a 4th try.

I had the same complaint, supposedly it curated that out quickly when you don't engage with it. I assume that is the biggest common interest new users have.

My biggest problem with TikTok is that it make you feel better when you come away even when you got nothing of value from it. I rarely remember what I saw 5 videos ago even if it's something that I thought was great.