[kizer]

The resilient services are those that occupy a non-gimmicky niche. I’ll explain the difference between a real niche and a contrived or gimmicky one.

For example, YouTube is the video site. That’s its niche.

TikTok occupies a more gimmicky niche; short-form videos with a gazillion little features to make it more fun. People may (will) eventually get tired of it. The funny thing is they may move to a service with a very similar offering but with a different style and gimmicks.

The ones that don’t fill a niche at all are also less resilient following this thinking, though other factors like being utterly entrenched (facebook) may keep them around a long time.

Another site that fills a real niche well is Instagram. It’s the pictures site. It’s nice to just scroll and see pictures, though they’ve diversified with reels and video content (which may actually be a bad idea in the long run).

Another classic example of a gimmicky niche service was Vine, though I preferred that to TikTok (which I don’t use aside from having played with it for a week).

I’m not saying that non-niche services can’t last, but niche services definitely have inherent advantage for longevity because they fill a simple need and it’s hard or not constructive even for challengers to differentiate.

[Melatonic]

Short form videos I think are here to stay - they really are sort of in between a pictures site and a long form video site like youtube or a streaming service like Netflix.

[kizer]

That’s a good point. Perhaps the image and video sites will eventually blend into hosting both — and short form video as well naturally. YouTube and Instagram both have short form video features and my youtube feed already has images amongst other things like polls.