They aren’t “stranded”, they’re addicted to or rather emotionally reliant on these platforms. It is a choice, you can pull the plug.

From the article:

If you’re a Gen Z kid on Tiktok, you experience the same enshittification as your Millennial elders. But you also experience an additional cost to staying: as late-arriving adult authority figures become more fluent in the platform, they are more able to observe your use of it, and punish you for conduct that you used to get away with.

And if you’re a Millennial who isn’t leaving Tiktok, it’s not just that you experience the same enshittification as those departing Gen Z kids – you also face higher switching costs if you go. The older you get, the more complex your social connections grow. A Gen Z kid in middle school doesn’t have to worry about losing touch with their high-school buddies if they switch platforms (they haven’t gone to high school yet – and they see their middle school friends in person all the time, giving them a side-channel to share information about who’s leaving Tiktok and where they’re headed to next). Middle-schoolers don’t have to worry about coordinating little league car-pools or losing access to a rare disease support group.

In other words: younger people leave old platforms earlier because they have more to gain by leaving; and older people leave old platforms later because they have more to lose by leaving.

And as a young millennial/old gen Z guy, I can switch networks with ease because I just don’t personally have any network to lose! I didn’t have any friends on Reddit when I left! And when I left Facebook, I only ever kept in close contact with two people.

Considering the history of the world and the fact that our species is a social one, I don’t think that people clinging to their social network is worth classifying to be an addictive or emotionally reliant behavior. I can tell you from personal experience: not having a social network is a fast-track to a difficult life.

There’s a world out there.

Right, so people leaving a social network would have to reintegrate into some in-person social network. That is seen as a cost to leave their current network.

Literally unless you want to just be alone all your life (which is fine and frankly I sympathize, hence why I’m not making friends on enshittified social networks), you need to go where the people are, even if it sucks, even and especially to do real things in the real world.

Pick one. It’s either an addiction OR a choice

Counterpoint: I’m 33 and a good portion of my friends my age have TikTok accounts and have sent me videos. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.