Comment by Swizec
1 year ago
> it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least
It is hard to keep up with niche interests! I blame it on being 36 with real responsibilities instead of 22 and in college.
I suspect that has a much bigger impact than the state of the web/internet today. My younger more energetic coworkers tell me about all sorts of fun and wonderful things they discover and deep-dive on TikTok. Just as I used to on blogs. The format is different but the variety and serendipity remains. If anything, "kids these days" have way more content and creators than we did.
Way more content, maybe, but on platforms that are not made for long term retention and curation, but for attention span of a fruit fly and optimized for engagement. The content might get the quick giggle or wow, but then it has passed. TikTok and similar are not the kind of platform that I would search answers to questions on or that I would use to follow a hobby in depth. Perhaps my hobbies don't lend themselves to being represented by TikTok shorts or whatever they call them there.
And yet I listened to a podcast once where a tax accountant explained that Instagram Search is her strongest lead pipeline.
At my dayjob we do women’s health, actual clinics with real doctors. Many of our users come from Instagram and TikTok ads. Because yes people will in fact choose their doctor based on a good Instagram/TikTok presence. In fact any time I mention the brand to female friends who live in our target markets they go ”Oh yeah! I’ve seen your ads on Instagram”. It’s never search, or a billboard, or a blog, or youtube, or even me telling them about it. They recognize us from Instagram and Tok.
It’s a wild world out there my friend. Makes me wanna yell at clouds every day.
Backing this up. Google is presently most feeling threatened by TikTok, not OpenAI.
Because an entire generation of new American adults does not use web browsers, like much at all.
Want a burger? You probably open Chrome, go to Google or Kagi and type “Burger $myCity”
People under 25 use TikTok and Instagram and just look for “burger” and are blasted by 300 10s videos of real people munching and smiling. Like a perfect commercial and entirely crowdsourced.
That’s the new internet. The kids only know ‘content’. They don’t know what the fuck an HTML file is.
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Wonder what that accountants ability to keep clients around looks like vs. Intentful Google searches, and what that market would look like.
You have to take the serious consideration that winning customers from tiktok is going to be a wildly different persona than from google.
Churn and burn practices are for folks who've not seen the 5th year of their used to be sustainable market crash when arbitrary platform dynamics change and they don't realize they've been working with the wrong type of client that whole time.
I work in Healthcare as well. It's just a giant farm so folks will take anyone who is alive and insured. I could see TokTik do well there.
I, and I'm sure there are many others in their 30's who would agree, prefer to get my information in written form. Pictures/diagrams are fine, but I don't want to watch a 10-15 minute video, or even a 2 minute video to get information I can read in less than 30 seconds. "Kids" these days seem to prefer the video medium much more. I don't know why, but I find it interesting that reading scores have also tanked a lot in the last 20 or some odd years.
S. P. Somtow nailed this 43 years ago in _Mallworld_. It's completely confusing to me also.
Wow, I never heard of that, sounds like I need that on my kindle ASAP. Thanks!