Despite ideas that at college you're supposed to meet people different to you, my college experience mainly consisted of me finding "my people" i.e. tech-obsessed nerds who use Reddit, Hacker News, IRC, Signal, and Discord. And that bubble only got more bubbly when I got internships and jobs at tech companies.
I don't want to project too hard, but it's easy to see how a site like HN could attract lots of people like that who don't engage with Snapchat regardless of age.
Truthfully, whenever I open Instagram or TikTok it's almost entirely thirst-traps in my timeline. But maybe that's just how the algorithm has been trained for me.
Here are all the TikToks I’ve saved: https://imgur.com/a/YuxWObp
The most interesting part is that “educational” outnumbers “lol” by about 5 to 4. I learn a lot on TikTok — more than Twitter. Of course, HN is still #1 for that (especially for depth) but production quality has been ramping up. TikTok recently emailed 10 minute videos, and it’s a matter of time till they do creator partnerships.
The effect is pretty magical. I recently filmed TikTok converting my 70yo parents into users within 5min: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1515056484668870659?s=2...
To get good algorithm recommendations, you have to use the “not interested” button. (Long press on a video.)
TikTok, though, seems to be popular.