This has nothing to do with tiktok. This same phenomenon can and does occur on all social networks, and people mistakenly self-diagnose all the time outside of social network use too
I've almost never seen anything actually interesting, insightful or even just fun with that stamp. Just a handful of times. So it looks to me like it's become the sewer of the internet. You might find a gold ring there but you have to wade through knee deep shit to get to it :)
Of course this is also the reason I've never even considered joining. Though I left Facebook too and have never been on Twitter.
It’s great. I think it’s more what you make it than any other social media platform. I watch videos and I get other videos that I’ll like. If I was interested in other things they would show up on my page, through the algorithm working really well. Nobody crowbars stuff in e.g. I don’t see any maga shit, I just see really entertaining content.
Obviously this self diagnosis is a very real issue, but it’s not caused by Tik tok. Tik tok is just good at surfacing the problem though
As a parent, I've experienced this in the last year. It was pretty easy to identify and correct for. Teens try out novel behaviors regularly. It's a good strategy for figuring out identity and maturing, but it does have these weird edge-cases that being on the lookout for and gently applying reality maintenance mechanisms corrects for.
1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201609/bri...
1 post on Facebook might reach 100s, 1000s of people. Rarely a page with large enough following may hit 100,000s of people.
1 post on TikTok from a moderate influencer can hit millions.
That’s not to say other social media forms haven’t had bad trends in the past, but TikTok has had far more and in a far shorter amount of time. People just don’t interact with other social content the way they buy into TikTok, which is dangerous and leads to far more misinformation — it was maybe not even 3 weeks ago I had a bunch of my friends sending me a bunch of popular TikTok videos and asking about how AI Transformers were here and taking over the world (they are, but transformers in AI have nothing in common with the movies).