And you will know us by the company we keep
My wife and I were discussing Facebook vs Instagram vs TikTok the other day. Neither of us use Facebook. My wife pointed out that our friends aren&#x27;t interesting. Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn&#x27;t that interesting to us. They&#x27;re still <i>friends</i>, but they just aren&#x27;t interesting to follow on social media.<p>On the flip side, I love TikTok. It&#x27;s full of strangers! New, exciting strangers doing wild, strange things in trendy and funny and smart and annoying and cringe-filled ways! TikTok is an entire world of social media that could never exist on Facebook. (Or maybe it did back when it started? I can&#x27;t remember.)<p>Instagram is the more interesting one for me. I observed over the course of this conversation that if you look at my feed, it&#x27;s boring stuff I don&#x27;t care about. I follow my friends and they post pictures of their kids and blah blah blah.<p>But if you click the &quot;Discover&quot; tab, it&#x27;s almost entirely three of my biggest interests: horses, fitness, and D&amp;D.<p>To Eugene&#x27;s point, my feed is my social graph, but my Discover tab is my interest graph.<p>Like Eugene, one of the things I like about TikTok is that it&#x27;s an interest graph and I happen to be connected to a few of my friends. But since I spend most of my time on the For You Page, I never see my friend&#x27;s stuff. That&#x27;s totally fine with me!<p>I&#x27;d love more social media apps to understand that connecting with my friends doesn&#x27;t mean I want to know everything they&#x27;re doing, and instead I want to meet at the intersection of my social graph and my interests. Those two things don&#x27;t often overlap, but when they do, it&#x27;s a recipe for fun and engagement.<p>FWIW, despite having dramatically increased the number of ads they display, I still maintain that Instagram&#x27;s ads are far and away better than Facebook&#x27;s, TikTok&#x27;s, Twitter&#x27;s, and even Google&#x27;s. I see an ad on IG and I very often say, &quot;huh, that looks cool&quot; whereas I would just gloss over it on other platforms.