SomethingMatter t1_jdelefh wrote on March 23, 2023 at 8:55 PM

Reply to comment by Kleanish in The average TikTok user in the US is an adult 'well past college age,' CEO says by djJAMZ

What does older in “users on TikTok are older than most think” mean? Older can refer to the majority (median) or average (mean). Most people think of it in terms of the first. TikTok used the mean for a reason, because it's lower than the median. If the data was skewed the other way around, they would have used the median. Hell, if the median user was past college age then they probably would have said that "there are more users past college age than younger".

Kleanish t1_jdelobl wrote on March 23, 2023 at 8:57 PM

It doesn’t matter though.

None of them; mode, median, or mean are close to the age of kids.

You are bringing up mute points

SomethingMatter t1_jdemg85 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 9:02 PM

> None of them; mode, median, or mean are close to the age of kids.

How can you know that? TikTok only gave the mean. They didn't give us the distribution or the median.

Kleanish t1_jdes0jb wrote on March 23, 2023 at 9:38 PM

I don't. Its very unlikely with the age they gave and the total population of users.

Like I said in the first comment, with a sample 10 or 20, its to be expected the median and average would vary a lot.

It is very unlikely, given the age they provided of the average, the median would stoop as low as a kid's age, under 13, or even under 16.

Here

Disclaimer: that is monthly active users. Though the second theory, while total number of users will be different than this graph, I imagine that the older the person is, the less likely they will continue using the app, or use it less often per month. As in monthly active users will skew lower in age than the total number of users.

So then maybe at one point in time, lets say hourly, the age of active users on TikTok may be very low.

See how nuanced we are getting?

Itll never be one data point. With how big TikTok is, single data points lose value.

SomethingMatter t1_jdey99p wrote on March 23, 2023 at 10:19 PM

I agree with this. We can see the skew from that graph but it depends what data points we look at. Daily users probably skew younger than monthly or total users. I also agree that I don't think the median would get as low as 16 years but even having half of your users under 18 isn't a good sign.

That's why I said the claim in the first place is bullshit. Obviously TikTok will pick the best data points to make their argument. They have all of the data and can cheery pick something to make their case.

Ironically, this is probably far less relevant than the algorithms that they use to push content to people. For example, anyone under 14 in China can't use TikTok for more than 40 minutes per day but that restriction doesn't exist here. And those users are also shown different content (educational) instead of the regular content. So the algorithm in China for youth is different from the algorithm for youth here.