Everything stated is my personal opinion.
Do you ever wonder why every time you scroll on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, every other video is an ad? When did you last sit down and watch a whole YouTube video? Did you try to watch a long video, only to quickly lose interest and start scrolling on TikTok? Platforms have developed new and improved ways to grab your attention and advertise to you. Longform content is a thing of the past and the world has moved to short-form content. A big part of this online culture shift is TikTok. TikTok has changed how we consume social media content for the rest of our lives. With so many “influencers” fighting the Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube algorithms, it can start to feel like you’re watching the same content over and over again, that you’re continuously being advertised to. There is no diversity and creativity in content anymore; everyone follows microtrends and creates the same 12-second video in different fonts to grasp viewers’ attention. New-age influencers aren’t the same as influencers of the past. Now, YouTubers find themselves fighting with this new short-form algorithm in hopes of keeping their channels alive. With social media platforms curating what you see on your feed to what you have previously been interested in, there is now a wide variety of “sides” of the internet. Growing up, most of your peers probably followed and watched the same few big YouTubers such as PewDiePie, Markiplier, and JackSepticeye. Perhaps that’s why Gen Z is so nostalgic about things that only occurred a few years ago, from 2014 Tumblr to the 2016 fidget spinner era. With the loss of centered content, we lose a sense of community. We even see a change in the way television series are made and broadcast to us. Remember TV shows like Vampire Diaries or Criminal Minds? Shows that ran for up to 20 episodes with 40-minute long episodes that released new seasons every year. Nowadays, we get Netflix series with 2 seasons, 8 episodes each, with years in between seasons. The never-ending evolution of the internet is a real and fascinating thing. With how fast the internet develops, what do you think the next form of social media consumption will be?
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