It's not particularly deep and genuine to double-tap to add a heart emoji to a video of a skimpily dressed complete stranger you "met" 5 seconds ago and will never see again unless Tiktok's algorithms think that would result in greater ad revenue.
It's exactly as deep and genuine as saying hi to a stranger in a bar (and if you think the barman is any less profit-oriented than the Tiktok algorithm you're naive) or whatever the back-in-your-day paradigm was.
Liking a video (and if all your videos are booty shakes from first trap influencers that says more about you than about the platform) might end you up in an interesting conversation, getting laid, finding a life partner, all sorts of things.
Saying hi to a stranger in a bar is exceedingly unlikely to result in any of these.
counterpoint: in any given bar interacting with a stranger means this stranger is interacting with you. If the stranger is tapping out, then you are free to go interact with other people.
1:1 interacters to interactee ratio.
In any given social network this ratio is very screwed. Most people have to became interacters at least a couple of times before they can become an interactee.
What? I’m sorry but this is just nonsense. There’s no way liking a video is more likely to result in those things than having a face to face interaction so someone
I met a friend of a friend in a bar last week. He just ran the NYC marathon and some girl he barely knew but thought was cute liked his Instagram photo. He decided to shoot his shot, and asked her to drinks and she accepted.
There is a reason people “sliding into the DMs” is a term. It usually starts with liking posts and later moves into DMs. That same guy also showed me that he also slid into the DMs with some other woman and has another first date scheduled.
Social media is super important for the younger generation and their social life.
A shallow interaction is unlikely to lead to something deeper but occasionally things line up and it becomes the start of a beautiful friendship. That's equally true on social media or AFK.
Maybe introducing yourself in-person is slightly deeper than thumbs-upping someone's video, but by the same token the latter is a smaller step; you can always go with a full-sentence comment or a video response of your own if you want the slightly deeper interaction.
Shallow interactions are shallow, deep interactions are deep, equally shallow interactions are equally shallow whether online or offline and the same for equally deep interactions. I'm not going to argue about what specific action corresponds to the precise depth of pushing like, whether it's saying "hi", grunting, making eye contact, or what have you; both online and offline you have a spectrum of ways to interact and having both shallow and deep options available is important, because you wouldn't want to start at the deep end with a stranger; you start with something shallow and most of the time it stays shallow but occasionally you find it worthwhile to turn it into something deeper.
In public shallow interactions don’t need to stay that way. It’s not a question of the possibility of levels of interaction but the rates.
Many people can go to a bar and fairly reliably get laid several times a month. That’s simply not possible for the overwhelming majority of people using TikTok. TikTok / Twitter/ Instagram etc are designed to be shallow interaction so people stick around. Dating apps fill that niche, but also want people to come back.
Being in public allows for the full range of relationships in any setting. You can meet a great friends at a bar etc.
This argument doesn't hold on a pure numbers basis. If you are one of 10 people to make eyes contact with someone at the bar, you are already in a far more privileged position than being the person who added one of a million likes to a video.
In forms of social media that existed primarily to produce inter-personal connections (i.e. very early Facebook, or maybe even LinkedIn) your argument works significantly better, but the way that instagram/tiktok/etc prioritise influencers in your feed makes the likelihood of 1-to-1 interactions infinitesimally low (unless you yourself are also playing the influencer game)
I mean. I can't small talk to save my life. But saying high to a stranger will at least get me 10 seconds of communication unless they are excessively rude (or you are). That's not going to happen on modern social media.
Someone much more charismatic in the right scene certainly can do such things more consistently. What's the equivalent here, Tinder dates? I wonder which is more effective for that tip charismatic male? (it's no doubt women are wayyy more successful on dating apps. Too successful).
I’ve talked to hundreds of people at bars around the world, and although I don’t remember their names, I can recall general conversations with each of them. I can’t recall anything that I’ve tapped-liked off the top of my head, because it’s very short and one-sided interaction.
Well, saying hi isn't deep at some meat market bar. But I remember in my younger days that my now-wife and I went to the same bar often enough that we knew most of the regulars, and she was talking to someone we knew well, so I was on my own.
I chatted up a woman who was probably 20 years my senior, and the two of us had grown up in the same neighborhood in that city separated only by time. We had a wonderful conversation for an hour or so. My now-wife came over at one point, I said we were having a conversation about my neighborhood, and she said, oh, you people always find each other (it was pretty distinctive in the city, and yes, we really did find each other). Now-wife walked away and went back to the others she had been hanging out with. I knew the exact house this woman had grown up in (it was one block away from where I was living at the time), having ridden my bicycle past it hundreds of times as a kid, and just listened to the stories of what it had been like then.
