It's been interesting to watch the steady decline of Reddit and Twitter since they launched. They've always had a significant amount of doom-and-gloom clickbait headlines, but in the past it was far easier to filter out the bad and follow subreddits or Twitter people with high signal to noise ratios.
Now, Reddit feels like a lost cause for anything other than consuming endless outrage headlines. r/popular is full of blatant misinformation that could be disproved with a simple Google search or outrage-bait headlines that make every event sound like the end of the world. Even the previously useful subreddits I subscribed to have been inundated with angry, angry people who manage to turn everything into an argument or relate it back to politics somehow.
I have to wonder if TikTok is simply enjoying the early days where the fun, light-hearted content still outweighs the intentionally rage-baity content. There does appear to be vast amounts of misinformation and angry content on TikTok, but it hasn't yet flooded the platform to a degree that it's unavoidable.
I feel like we watched a similar rise and fall of Clubhouse during the pandemic. The early days were full of people with genuine curiosity and good intentions about socializing, but it quickly devolved into lowest common denominator content. I haven't opened Clubhouse for months, but the last time I opened it I remember scrolling through endless "how to get rich" rooms that were keyword stuffing popular terms until I just gave up on the platform altogether.
Maybe TikTok's algorithm and model can stave off the Eternal September problem, but I feel like it's only a matter of time until the signal to noise ratio drops below most people's thresholds for decent content.