I've noticed my boomer parents using instagram and tiktok. I can't tell you how excited I am for them to kill those platforms like they did facebook.

I skipped those, but I’m about to ruin whatever new platform my kids get in to.

As is tradition.
- Your boomer parents? You're 40 something?
... was written on lemmy 😬
- Implying we aren't mostly disgruntled boomers here.
Nah. If you started skipping trends already you are free. Just use what you like lol
- Well I happen to like embarrassing my kids so…
I can't wait to log in to the newest gamer platform only to engage in trash talk with a select group of boys. Three of them, to be exact.

"I fucked your mom!"
"Dad, go away..."

My dad really changed since joining TikTok. Now that's all he talks about. Come look at this, come look at this,...
"But I am busy."
"Oh, come on, it's short."
"Look. See? People love Putin."

For fucks sake... Then he proceeds to loudly curse when he gets yet another account banned for posting some trash.
When I try to talk to him, I am met with "Wait, I just have to finish this video." then later he complains I don't talk with him. ¿?

I mean, it's not just TikTok alone, he uses Facebook, TikTok and VKontakte, but I feel like that had the biggest influence.

start behind the scene subscribing to anti-putin posts and channels and see he changing opinion lol
- Ask not what you could do for the algorithm. Ask what the algorithm can do for you.
- 100%. This actually works. Most boomers are not technologically late enough to track subscriptions and such.
  
  There was a YouTube video not a documentary (similar to The Brainwashing of My Dad) where their father went down the rabbithole, but they started subscribing them to better news sources, and eventually to left-leaning news sources, and he did a whole 180°.
  
  Fear is like a drug. It's addictive, and rightwing media sources have cracked the formula on how to get people addicted to it, and it can happen to ANYONE. The uneducated to the well-educated. The only thing that makes you immune to it is critical thinking and empathy - which is why I feel that their next war is on education and masculinity. They are literally trying to perfect the addiction so you can never leave it.
  
  This is part of the reason why education is so insanely important.
My father's the same but I think moving south really revealed what was already there. This just highlights it more.
My dad can hardly use his phone and this sounds absolutely haunting.

once the boomers get there and start liking it, that's when you know it's about to reach peak and crash hard. my parents are talking about reddit. case in point.

In contrast to the others, Reddit decided to kill itself off before most Boomers have even heard of it:-).
- lol you right
Hey now, a lot of us boomers are already on Lemmy.
- The boomers I know haven't found reddit yet so there is still time. It's not that boomers are on a platform, it's when boomers like my parents get there that shit starts to spiral out.
- The responsible ones.
  
  ...
  
  I hope...
My boomer dad has been on Reddit for years. But he just looks at football and fishing subreddits.
They've been there. So have gen x and millennials and obviously gen z. Y'all are so petty lol

Not before their brains start to rot by using those in the first place

It's scary to see how even the older generation gains reduced attention span, reduced ability to learn and need for instant gratification on this short dopamine machine.

I experience it myself. I know I am an addict and need to quit. Yet here I am.
- It's a loop that is hard to quit once you've entered it.
  
  I wish you success; maybe a good digital detox on the countryside with some simple books, field work and joys may help to reset your mind?

I hate to break it to you my not-so-tech-savvy friend, but boomers on tiktok is not going to destroy tiktok like it did Facebook. The algo will basically only show their content to other boomers and young people will largely be unaware of it.

The same was true of Facebook my not-so-socially-savvy friend. Kids will stop using it once they realise grandma is on there because it is no longer cool.
- Again, Facebook and TikTok operate differently. One is a social network, the other is a short form video platform. A social network is inherently dependent on its users. Did YouTube die when it became widely adopted??
- Facebook was best when people used to call their friends cocksuckers and put up photos of people being drunk on the floor.
  
  Then it stopped because everyone's family could see and it stopped being funny.
  
  Then the ads really killed itm
Until you get the inevitable 'hey nurgs, isnt this your mom?' from your friends.
You do know kids can find out grandma is on tiktok other ways than just the site itself? Touch grass, remember there's a world outside
- But would anybody be bothered by it, if there's no interaction there? Boomers destroyed Facebook for younger audiences, as all of a sudden parents would join in on conversations with your friends in the comments under a photo. You would link an article about a political issue and your reactionary uncle would proceed to call everyone who reads it a damn commy that needs to go to the army to learn some real life.
- lol. I can’t tell if you just don’t know any young people or if it’s that you don’t know the difference between a social network and a short term video app. (Or you’re just mad cause tiktok = bad.)

Oh don't worry, OP, soon you'll be a cranky old perosn who'll be complaining about whatever social media the young'uns are using and doing your part to "kill" something else by using it

Promise?

Cause all I want is a platform that isn't shoving ads down your throat; respects privacy; helps you feel connected with peers; and isn't plastered with hate.

I'll be ruining quite a few platforms with those expectations.
- Facebook was all those things in the beginning.
  
  Reddit was all those things in the beginning.
  
  Twitter was all those things in the beginning.
  
  LinkedIn was all those things in the beginning.
  
  The Internet in general was all those things in the beginning.
  
  I've never used IG/TT but I assume they were all those things in the beginning.
  
  Lemmy will probably be said to be most of those things in the beginning.
  
  With age comes wisdom, which comes once you've seen the pattern happen enough times, which can only come with age.
  
  Sincerely,
  
  One of those old people.

Kids think anyone older than 25 are boomers. I would wager that the average age here on Lemmy is ~30. So by default, we are all boomers here.

With that said, follow my onlyfans account for cat news and all things related cats at

OnlyCatFans

Expected Rick Roll but was still sad you didn't have an Only fans for cats. That would probably make decent money out of spite.
i was expecting actual cats spoiler :::
You really sound like boomers in this whole post tbh. TikTok hasn't been just full of kids or whatever in years... My page is full of hydroponic farmers, cat videos, game memes, d&d stuff, and other comedy shit. Almost all of which are channels run by millennials around my own age.

You guys are so out of touch and you frankly look goofy with this petty shit.
- You sound like you are in dire need of cat videos and other cat related content.

“Kill” those platforms just means “I don’t use it”. Petty absurd thing to say considering how huge FB still is.

considering how huge FB still is.

FB is only huge because they've expanded all over the globe, even providing internet to developing nations to facilitate new user acquisition. In reality they've been bleeding the original Western users that signed up between '04-'10, and growth among new generations flatland a long time ago. There's a reason Meta aggressively expanded to other ventures (or attempt to create platforms) like Instagram, Threads, what's app, VR and metaverse. Metas only chance at sustainable growth and capturing young people is to build or buy platforms young people will use, because it ain't Facebook.
- Are you arbitrarily adding conditions and moving the goalposts? I said FB is huge, and that is true. Your rebuttal “only because” really doesn’t change that, if anything it reinforces it. It also doesn’t change the fact that FB hasn’t been “killed” as originally postulated.
- FB is only huge because they've expanded all over the globe, even providing internet to developing nations to facilitate new user acquisition
  
  And they only say Godzilla is huge because she can crush a tank with her foot.
- "Facebook is only huge because they're huge." lmao
I know very few people that use Facebook, mostly for groups or market if they are. Compare that to a time where everyone was on Facebook, Facebook is dead.
I mean, is it? It's pretty much just boomers using it regularly now.
- If it's just the Boomers, it's dead, why the fuck would companies want to market to people with lots of disposable income and nothing to do all day?????
- This might surprise you to learn, but boomers are, in fact, people. They might not be the driving force behind the parts of the digital economy you care about, but they still count. They still make money for the services they use.

People of all ages have been on TikTok for years now... Y'all are the ones sounding like boomers lol

Aboomersayswhat

But Facebook still exists.

Yep, it still exists. Like a marionetted corpse waltzing around selling garage sale items and finding lost dogs.
- I think you're confusing it with Zuckerberg. Or maybe they're one and the same?
Yeah, but have you seen the state of it recently? It's a shell of its former self
- Maybe but it's almost a $2trillion dollar company. Might be a shell, but it's popular.
- As someone who joined Facebook way back when it was brand spanking new to the public: It's always sucked. I don't even remember a single person who chose it over MySpace until way later on when they added games to FB.
- No, and I don't intend to. Fuck that place.
- I have not, thankfully.
I don't understand the "killed Facebook" thing either. I haven't used Facebook in almost 10 years but as far as I know it's still printing money.
- Killed Facebook because the people who were into it and enjoyed using it.. stopped using it 10 years ago. If I were to log into my Facebook account right now, I would see my mum posting Sovereign Citizen stuff. My aunty sharing photo after photo of my nephews and nieces. My other aunty talking about her later life crisis holidays to South Africa. And advertisement after advertisement for random junk.
  
  If I’m lucky, one of my friends will have posted something like “Photo from Butterfly Effect reunion last night. These guys still kick ass”
  
  “Facebook” is alive and well but it’s a different product than we knew and, whether intended or not, target audience is boomers and terminally online jerkoffs.
And by most estimates it has more active users than ever.

It's no longer "hip" but being hip and being popular are opposing goals.

Someday kids will understand when the baby boomers were actually born.

Or, I guess OP is a middle-aged person complaining about his elderly parents being on a phone app.

I mean, I'm only 30 and my parents are boomers. They weren't even that old when they had me. - I'd imagine there's plenty of early-20's kids running around with boomer parents.
- Early 20's here with 65y/o parents 👋
- Yeah, I'm in my early twenties and my mom is in her sixties. A friend of mine is in her mid twenties and her parents are both in their sixties, too. Some people wait longer to have kids for various reasons. Luckily, my mom barely knows how to open Chrome, so at least I don't have to worry about her getting addicted to TikTok lmao.
Dude at my work is 68 and and talks about what he saw on TikTok every day. Even my 93 year-old aint jas a smartphone these days.
elderly is a bit harsh referring to people in their 60's.

I know a lot of boomers (yes, baby boomers) who keep talking about tiktok.

Same with Reddit! My mother-in-law recently said, "I looked it up on Reddit."

We used to do just that, google was where you went to find things. Reddit was where you went to tell other people what you found.

Now you google things on Reddit to find the post where someone else put in the effort to find something. Googles base results are such SEO garbage that niche things might as well not be indexed or gasp on the second page. Reddit itself has also become unuseable with the redesigns, old.reddit/ooer was more readable than the current UI/UX.
- I want to use another engine so bad but Google has such little nice-to-have features that no other engine has.
Boomers are also helping Reddit ban people that contribute all the time! Since Reddit’s appeal process is garbage and site wide bans are common, even more users are getting kicked off the platform. Just in time for that IPO.

Uh oh, you're becoming the generation affixed to social media platforms.

Oh, you'll try to hang on, I'm sure you've got a BlueSky and ZingZang account, probably dabble in Xruddle to stay "cool," but you're whining about dated platforms that most people younger than you are already moving beyond.

Fight. Fight against the dying of the light!

Whining? I'm fucking stoked.
- Stoked about a silly and out of touch scenario you made up entirely in your head lmao. This really is some Facebook level shit

If by kill you mean turn into a cesspool of right wing extremist propaganda and incel shit only a boomer could spout and still fuck, then most platforms are already there or pretty close.

Never felt the need to join tiktok, my friends and family on it kept sending me links to it that were videos that I had already seen weeks ago somewhere else.

To everyone defending the elderly: Have you considered they're not ruining these sites because they're old, but because they're baby boomers specifically?

It's harder for them to kill since the algorithm on TikTok is so strong it isolates the demographics.

Clean Your Room Challenge incomming

Instagram? Yes because now it's Facebook with a different skin

TikTok I don't think so: main problem with FB/IG is that you'll get "friend requests" from all your family, and the algorithm is really strong on snitching you. Eventually you would need to create custom viewing permission lists (which nobody does) or stop posting stuff if you don't want getting comments from your family. With TikTok you get videos from strangers and your videos gets shared to strangers, it's unlikely that the algorithm pushes your stuff to your relatives

I wish people hated the brigading proudboys this much. They would be more deserving.

It do.. It.. It do be hittin differently tho.

How did they kill Facebook?

By using it. People don"t post freely when Aunty Carol is gonna comment and snitch
- It’s also fun watching your friends call out Uncle Bob and Grandma for being complete racists, and the conversation spiral completely out of control.
If you're at the poker table and can't tell who the fish is....
Same way millennials killed Applebee's.

they are already bad, no need to ruin them.

As a 34 year old, my wider circle already killed Instagram. They post memes, news videos, and in some stories - a picture with million words on them. There already is a social media platform for this. Know what? FACEBOOK. If you're going to use Instagram like Facebook, just use Facebook. I wish Instagram would go back to being used for just photo/short video updates and that's it.

Took a nice photo of your pet? Instagram. Recorded a clip on your XSX/PS5 and want to share? Facebook. Made a short video montage of clips of your recent road trip? Instagram. Took a video of your cousin's graduation? The video is 5+ minutes so Facebook.

I miss the intent of Instagram. There is a mood I'm in to want to see a ton of crap, and when I'm in that mood, I'd use Facebook to dig through all the updates. I liked Instagram for its simplicity. Been using Instagram since I first got my iPod Touch 4, and many of my friends in college used it as I wrote above. The same people no longer do it.

I'm 40 and my friends use Instagram to show travel pictures and scenes of their daily lives. Guess it's a matter of who you're friends with, I don't have a single meme-slinging clown there.
Don't blame the users for using the feature Instagram provided and then promoted heavily through view preference. Instagram was lost when it allowed video. Remember the crash of single-image videos on Facebook? Same shit, preferential serving of videos on Facebook. You're asking users to self-regulate to a standard you set nearly half your lifetime ago. So yeah, I'd love for Instagram to just be pictures for vine to host quippy videos, and to keep long format videos on either YouTube or Facebook depending on content, but I can't be mad at my platform-active friends for maximizing views

The thing you kids don't understand about entering middle age is yes you'll see thy thing you hated because kids use it die but kids don't stop- there will be something that replaces it which will be even more alien and distressing for you

Is everyone a "kid" to you?

Yea..get more boomers on shit platforms. My boomer uncle has got apple watch, apple phone and everything in his house is "smart" appliances. All i can say is He has lost his fucking mind!

Weren't them a "boomer" thing for a long time?

Why?

Chaos.
- The sooner it all goes to shit, the sooner we can move on.

The kids (not you guys) will just move on to another platform, mate. Depending on the stage of growth, the company will burn through its funding, the owners will cash out, list then cash out, sell the data and move on to the next grift. Circle of life and all that.

Also see vr, llm, gai, etc. In SEA we have a company carsome that was touted as a 'unicorn', and I can't see their value proposition for the life of me.

Tst

Aren’t actual boomers? Or just slang for people older than 40?

is it so hard to believe ops parents are 60+ ?
- No, but my kids call me a boomer and I’m a millennial. I appreciate the shade.

I think TikTok is at its peak and will be sad if it goes to shit like Insta and Facebook. Although I am a Gen Xer it currently fills the holes that Twitter and Reddit left empty…I see what is trending, cool stuff, news, cute animals and broaden my horizons with lgbtq and black issues. Of course it’s not the same experience for everyone but I find it pretty fulfilling a lot of times as social media, entertainment etc.

The stuff with TikTok lately has really made me reconsider bothering with lemmy tbh. This post is talking about boomers while they say some of the most boomer shit ever lol. The way they blatantly make things up is just sad too
Maybe you could pickup a hobby. Or better yet, you could go talk to someone face to face.
- This right here is some boomer shit. Wow.