I don't think it's fad driven, it's the inherent design of the app that makes it so addictive. Video only, video content is lowest effort to consume. ALL conten

I don't think it's fad driven, it's the inherent design of the app that makes it so addictive. Video only, video content is lowest effort to consume. ALL content is super short form and shallow, anything longer than 20s is considered long, so it's easy to keep that dopamine cycle going. It's a content graph rather than a social graph, people eventually get bored of whatever uninteresting thing their real life friends are up to. And the recommendations algorithm algorithm is finely tuned to deliver the most addictive content. I'm sure other social media platforms have tried to build recommendation algos that are as good as TikTok's, they just haven't succeeded. And now I'm not sure that a high quality recommendation algorithm is actually in the consumers interest.