> my colleagues might actually feel better about their children being on TikTok than any sort of Meta product
As a former scrolling addict, I can attest that Instagram is by far worse for mental health than Tik Tok. It's about the algorithms.
If you show Tik Tok that you like certain niche content it will learn that and only show you it, when it tries to show you something else that you don't prefer (once every 100 videos in my case) if you show disinterest it won't show more of it.
With Instagram, what you prefer (e.g. mindful content) is secondary to bombarding you with content that triggers endless scroll behaviour. I've tried training it to not do that by clicking the explicit "not interested" button, on dozens of videos at a time, multiple sessions, but it just wouldn't work. At times it seemed like it is finally learning what i prefer, and then next day mindless memes are again 90% of the feed. In contrast, Tik Tok required a tiny fraction of explicit training that I prrformed on Insta, and on Tik Tok it was very effective.
I can say with absolute certainty that Instagram is very detrimental to my health (hence I don't use it), and suprisingly Tik Tok is actually pretty great.
My usual Tik Tok session now looks like this: I launch it, get a video that's really relevant to me, and for every video that I watch there's about 30% chance that I'll close the app because I'm either thinking about what I learned or researching it. My endless scroll behaviour is never triggered. And I don't usually use Tik Tok more than 2 times a week. This isn't because of willpower, it's because I genuinely value the content it's providing me and I need time to digest it. Watching more often would be like wasting it. This has been going on for about 6 months now.
Disclaimer: I wouldn't be suprised if I'm in some a/b testing program within Tik Tok, and it might be using a variant algorithm. I don't have evidence, but I know that for a time my UI was a little different than others' (e.g. no favorite functionality).