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Old farts of Hexbear, is there something about younger people that you don't get? [no punching down!]
(hexbear.net)
OK this is my list. But first, I need to say that this isn't a condemnation of those into such thing. They just don't vibe with me.
- Cannot get into ASMR. I've tried. Often its women 20 years younger than me, rubbing their fingernails on hairbrushes. The intentional sounds they make with their lips and fingers are things that would make me want to change seats on a bus.
- Instagram. I was maybe the last person to get a smart phone. It was probably 2016. I'm just fully lazy to take photos of stuff. This is a real issue when I'm single and I need to start putting photos on dating sites, as all pics of me in my phone are me squeezing carrots in my nostrils and similarly goofy things.
- My students' taste in anime. I try to be all cool and show off my cool taste in anime, maybe drop a Azumanga Daioh clip. It's all ancient history for 17 year olds.
- Photo and videos done in portrait mode. I guess I don't watch videos on the go. See #2
Things that the kids these days do better:
- Usually better opinions on current events than people my age
- I wish that cosplay existed when I was a teen. The default when I was younger was drugs.
If anyone insults the kids, I will visit you at your home and do an 
I think it's a really common experience to approach an unfamiliar platform and to view it as a monolith. In some respects they genuinely are.
I dip in and out of tiktok but I've cultivated a feed that is mostly radical politics (and of that, mostly communist), along with a few other areas of interest like autism.
Where tiktok really shines is in its capacity for shorter form vlog style videos from people who wouldn't otherwise have a platform. Likewise, response videos can be really good too.
You know when you get into a deep conversation with someone and they spend a few minutes talking about something that they're deeply interested in or concerned about? My tiktok feed often feels a lot like that. Some communist will find an interesting excerpt from a book they're reading and they'll connect it to a current phenomenon or situation, or they'll start talking about how certain things parallel or how it fits into a broader historical context.
If you refuse to participate in yet-another social media platform or you are abhorred by the dopamine slot machine design of tiktok, I fully support you in your position. But if you are interested in it, the tiktok algorithm is really quite good and if you spend maybe an hour or two training it then it will start to cough up lots of really good stuff that is rare to find elsewhere.
It's a bit weird. It's its own cultural bubble. Mainstream tiktok is irredeemable garbage, just like mainstream subreddits or Facebook groups or whatever else. But there's some pretty great little niches that exist in there as well.