Comment by refulgentis

Really good question...TL;DR: I'd put it around when Mark Z decided Instagram also had to be Snapchat. (copied Stories) It normalized a behavior of copying.

I had gotten completely out of these apps, then ended up in a situation where I needed to use Snapchat daily if not hourly for messaging, and needed to use TikTok to be culturally literate. (i.e. I got into something romantic with someone younger).

It was a stunning experience. Seeing _everyone_ had normalized this "copy our competitor" strat, hill-climbing on duration of engagement.

YouTube Shorts is a crappy copy of TikTok with mostly TikTok reposts and no sense of community.

Snapchat has a poor clone of TikTok that I doubt anyone knows exists.

TikTok is the ur-engagement king. Pure dopamine, just keep swiping until something catches your attention, and swipe as soon as it stops. No meaningful 1:1 communicating aspect (there's messages, but AFAICT from light quizzing of Gen Zers, it's not used for actual communication)

Instagram specifically is hard for me to speak to, because Gen Zers seem to think its roughly as cool as Facebook, but my understanding is millennials my age or younger (I'm 37) use it more regularly, whereas Gen Z uses it more as like we'd think of Facebook, a generic safe place where grandma can see your graduation photos, as opposed to spontaneous thirst traps.