TikTok was never social media

Well, they did it. After years of will-they-won’t-they, TikTok went dark in the US on Sunday. I’m kind of amazed it actually happened. But then it unhappened.

Maybe it stays up, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe RedNote or Lemon8 or some other app swoops in to recreate the ecosystem. Lots of maybes.

But either way, there’s one thought about TikTok that I could never shake: it wasn’t really social media.

I recently heard somebody make the distinction between “creator platforms” and “social media,” and it immediately resonated. By and large, the people you follow and interact with on creator platforms aren’t your friends or colleagues – they’re much closer to being actors and news anchors than your classmates or neighbors. On social media, it’s the opposite – your connections are, broadly speaking, actual connections.

TikTok and YouTube are in the first category. Facebook and LinkedIn are in the second. Instagram and Twitter are somewhere in the middle, but were generally closer to the social media side of the spectrum in their original interations, and have been moving more creator-focused in recent years.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but because TikTok was a creator platform in the shape (disguise?) of social media, some weird things happened with it.

When I was a twenty-something on Facebook and Instagram, the people I saw on there were also generally other twenty-somethings. We were all broke students or interns, we’d be doing the same type of traveling or socializing, and we’d be in the same rough ballpark in our family and professional lives.

But my 21-year-old students today don’t live in that same digital world. Their feeds aren’t full of their peers. Instead, they often see people 5, 10, or 20 years older than them, with more life under their belt and cash in the bank. And it really screws with them.

Back in the fall, a survey went viral showing that, on average, Gen Z would need a salary of $587,797 to consider themselves financially successful. As a reference, Millennials said about $180k, and Boomers said just under $100k. Yikes.

This context collapse is a recipe for depression, anger, and a cocktail of other misery. (And working the other way, it’s causing us aging millennials to become futilely obsessed with staying cool.)

Some more maybes: Maybe the answer is another social platform. Maybe the answer is messaging. Or maybe the answer is just to log off.