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Comment by PhunkyPhil | Hacker News Reader

That's surprising to me. I'm 23 and Reels is, as far as I was aware, a big complimentary app to TikTok in my generation. To frame it as a Reel I saw;

"TikTok is vape and Reels are cigarettes".

TikTok's algorithm is _super_ curated and targeted, like a Mr. Beast video. Instagram's is pretty good but if you can get your algorithm to the brainrot cluster with everyone else then you'll get a lot of out-of-left-field, grungier content you might not find on TikTok.

I think once RedNote gets banned or the meme fades people will mainly flock to IG. There's still a void of creator based features that IG can't fill, so maybe a competitor will pop up if IG can't replicate the environment well enough.

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Counterpoint here, I'm 32 and would have to disagree on the complimentary piece.

In my group of friends, the reels/shorts crowd have eased off on keeping up with the latest fads/memes. Its similar to the old meme cycle of them starting on 4chan and some filtering down to Digg/Reddit, you end up with them being watered down or receive them extremely late in the fad cycle.

Reels have a few problems, the biggest one is randomly getting served gore/death videos. This has never happened to me on tiktok. I feel like (cant substantiate this) reels pushes sex/thirst content more than tiktok does. The final one is the actual social aspect of tiktok vs reels, the comments and interactions on reels are very abusive and spammy compared to tiktok.

I do agree with you about RedNote being a fad, its artificially inflated but its possible the astroturfing of "interaction" will lead to a sustainable level of organic/real interaction with the app. IG is not great for communities.

You're 32 i.e. too old to really matter for this market. The companies are battling for 14-23 year olds.

He's likely to have more disposable incomr and go through a crisis of some sort that many people fill with buying, whilst also deluding themselves they're still in their 20s. I think mid 30s is a pretty hot market for advertisers.

I mean we’ll buy anything with a Harry Potter logo on it, so yeah.

I really hope people will unflock from most social media, at last for now that it is really at its worst. Perhaps in time, after building some open source social media platforms that does not have these big corporations in charge, things will change for the better.

I disagree I could never get past the dopamine bait posts on Reels to genuine conversations like I could on TikTok

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