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 booty shake video from some thirst trap influencer is exceedingly unlikely to result in any of these.
Saying hi to a stranger in a bar is exceedingly unlikely to result in any of these.
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.
How? Give an example that actually happened. If you can, address the relative likelihood vs. in-person contact.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
The bartender played no role in it at all.
You won't have that experience on TikTok.