Comment by lblume
9 hours ago
On average, Gen Z uses 5 hours of social media per day in the U.S. (3-4 hours in other Western countries). I would refrain from calling this "alright".
9 hours ago
On average, Gen Z uses 5 hours of social media per day in the U.S. (3-4 hours in other Western countries). I would refrain from calling this "alright".
Actually, most would be willing to get rid of it if there were other modes with positive network effects.[0]
"Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to nonusers, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these externalities and apply it to estimate consumer welfare from two social media platforms: TikTok and Instagram. Incentivized experiments with college students indicate positive welfare based on the standard measure but negative welfare when accounting for these nonuser externalities. Our findings highlight the existence of product market traps, where active users of a platform prefer it not to exist."
[0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231468