So saying people use TikTok directly to keep up with their friends might not be the full picture. But I'd still say for many people TikTok plays a role in keeping up with your friends in that trading TikTok finds is a popular activity for many friends.
Actually I wonder if there’s a market for an actual social network that is restricted to only being social.
Maybe you can only have 100 connections and you can’t post links or rants. Just life updates and photos.
There's a huge market for them. They're called private group chats, and they're popular everywhere. The problem is that you can't make much money off of that, precisely because they're socially valuable (i.e., they're strictly socially-driven, so there's no opportunity for in-line advertising, or recommending "new connections").
The problem I most often experience with group chats is that not everyone's on the same platform (excepting SMS) but old fashioned social media has that issue too. They also don't scale super well to large clubs or organizations, where I think having topic-oriented posts or threads as the default becomes valuable.
I consider the inability to do this a feature, not a bug. Group chats are socially segmented, with friction between those segments. That crazy uncle who loves conspiracy theories will be confined to just the group chats you have in common. You don't get insufferable loudmouths at scale, amplified by social media reward structures and algorithms.
They used to be social networks until they got littered with short-term engagement boosting content and ads. Facebook in 2006/2007 was so awesome.
It demonstrably reduces happiness and life satisfaction. It’s just bad.
And it’s easy to quit. Really.
Even later the groups function was great for many.
On balance it’s been bad, but it has its moments in the sun.
It was also a desktop experience so it wasn’t nearly as potent as it was when the smartphone showed up
Many I’ve been exposed to wouldn’t know what to post if it wasn’t regurgitated content or rants.
We could go back to the early days of Facebook and Twitter: “I’m having toast! And it’s not burned!”
It could be an improvement.
I believe Path tried to do this too, and failed.
If you look at an average user's feed, it probably breaks down into 30% traditional advertising, 20% nontraditional advertising (via influencers and friends shilling for their employers and promoting their side hustles), 30% content by people they have no social relationship with (celebrities, etc.), 15% low-quality posts from acquaintances, and 5% content from legitimate friends.
That is a whole lot of junk to have to sift through just to get the occasional scrap of legitimate social interaction.
These are advertising networks first, and social networks a distant second, even though they ostensibly involve social graphs.
So I can understand the fatigue people feel about having to scroll and scroll and scroll just to stay in the loop with people they have an existing social relationship with and genuinely want to know what's going on in their lives.