This article is well written, but the intense focus on TikTok is strange. I don’t understand how TikTok can be a source of true information or a town square for that matter. The videos are incredibly short and then the next one comes. You see a lot of dumb shit and stupid memes. It’s sometimes good at making people feel like they are learning something, but when you ask those people what they learned, they can’t synthesize or explain what it was they supposedly digested. To me, TikTok seems like pure dopamine hits without any sustainability.
Twitter, with its short character count, wasn’t any good for debate or sustained learning either. It was good for being a dunk tank—a place where people try to dunk on each other. It also became an echo chamber that helped polarize people politically. I don’t really understand the appeal of Twitter.