The cultural gap between people engaged with social video and people who aren't is unbelievable. I've never seen this man in my life. Hundreds of millions of views. There are gazillions of him.
"Extremely online" text posters on Twitter or here are, in fact, clustered in an extremely isolated and out of touch corner of the web. Maybe that makes them even more online than normal folks, in a sense. Whatever the case, you'll see TikToks pop up on Twitter *ages* after they first went viral.
i did my first ever video on TikTok, just a clip of a Donald Sutherland interview, and it got 3.5 million views. the scale on video stuff is off the charts next to Twitter.
This is also a case of 'first one's free kid', since new/young accounts are deliberately boosted while older accounts go down in the algorithm's ranking
IMO a significant part of this if you’re a millenial is that the people who have historically driven pop culture (teens) are all objectively of a different generation.
If history’s any guide, if you’re approaching 40 you’re *supposed* to have no idea who a bunch of pop culture figures are and it’s going to be an alienating experience.
there's a genuinely interesting sort of lateral function and passing around of information and pop culture; twitter for the longest time (and often still is) the First place to get the news, especially in crisis events. used to be top for pop culture too, but that shifted...
...and now tiktok has taken the lead there, with twitch and youtube adjacent to it (the latter with the longest tail but no longer the big Immediate Hit) factor. and meanwhile, frequent subjects of discourse are often still *years* behind tumblr, filtering from there to twitter to tiktok.
lotta Format Is Function here. tumblr is one of the best for longform written material, so it was ideal in the new waves of discourse mines post the big days of PHPbb forums. twitter is perfect for Headlines From Breaking News. and tiktok is ideal as pop culture thanks to video + music licenses.
(music license aspect can't be underrated; giving tons of people outlets to actually use a shitload of songs for making their own media without immediately getting DMCAed like they would everywhere else is fucking *huge*)
addendum: that twitter is still basically The place for news feels like it's a big part of how people break their brains on thinking the posting there is world altering shit and the most important social network. whatsapp matters much more but gets discussed basically never
One of my favorite things to do is listen to music I like and noodle along with the piano to it, and I'd love to stream that.. but as I can tell it still simply Can't Be Done without absolute mountains of labor and money.
can't even do it as ephemeral 'this video will be deleted afterwards' livestream only stuff elsewhere cuz it's entirely likely to get your channel banned completely. shit sucks.
As a person also outside of all of this, every now and then I like to look at the trending tab on YouTube to just see a bunch of names pop up that I have no idea what it is
My sister-in-law has a joke where if someone asks her if she’s seen this TikTok video she says, “no, I’m going to watch it 3 weeks later on Facebook, LIKE AN ADULT”
