To be fair youtube is not really social media in traditional sense. It's more of a content delivery platform. It's not a place where you go to watch pixtures from your friends holiday or political hot takes but more traditional entertainment.
It's funny how closely early YouTube resembles TikTok in the 'average people singing, dancing, vlogging, being funny in front of the webcam' type of video that's entirely missing from modern YouTube (the webcam having been seamlessly replaced by the front-facing phone camera).
Even the median length was similar, around 30 seconds, and the video responses feature for replying to one video with another certainly looks familiar. We can look back at exactly how it was in the Wayback Machine: here's a random snapshot of the 'Most Recent' page from 2006.[1] Remember the stereotypical TikTok feed full of dancing girls?
We can't get the past internet back, of course, but this realization really made me see TikTok in a different way. (though YouTube's propensity for recommending decade-old videos ought to be noted with regard to this--a social media site willing to show you some of its oldest content, that's rare!)
