> There have been truly godawful social media systems out there, like Nintendo's Miiverse or the old Dark Souls message system. They're still immensely fun to use, though - mostly because of the culture of their userbase.

I think large, modern, free social like TikTok are often built to be more to be advertiser-friendly, and that prevents such a culture from emerging in the first place. Curation and moderation -- natural ways are to form a bond or culture with other users are prevented by TikTok since the default feed is a stream of videos (and according to the article, selectively controlled by ByteDance).

> There are alternatives, TikTok should not be the be-all-end-all of internet interaction anyways.

Well, hopefully users read the article and discover new ones! Not sure how old you are, but my understanding is that TikTok and Instagram are pretty much the places to be for teens and college students in the US -- they are basically the Facebook for this generation.