My quote was refering to kids:
And evidence:
Numbers using Facebook have dropped significantly since 2015, with YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat more popular
www.theguardian.com
Oh, that looks like competition to me.
Well at least you did a citation this time so commendations for that.
However when you look at the Pew data it leads to a different set of conclusions that what The Guardian edited the data to. Youtube wasn't included in the first poll at all so needless to say, including an entirely different media that wasn't present the first time around is going to change your results, a lot. As I already showed, their userbase decreased not a whit and in fact steadily grew without drops so
something's up with those numbers, specifically they changed what they were asking and thus got different results.
So here's the thing. Competitors (an economic term where you went to a normal dictionary for instead of an economics definition) working together is something that can happen, which you would know if you knew more economics. It's called a cartel (drug cartel's get their name from this). It usually consists of agreeing to set a price floor/supply cap to jack prices and profitability, to create a joint monopoly... which can't happen if there's a sole monopoly. So for this to happen, Twitter can't be a monopoly, or there would be no one to cooperate illegally with.
Here's a better definition of competition for you, from wikipedia:
So the firms are varying their product to get a good (viewer eyes).
Yay, more semantics and passive-aggressive insults. Your different definition isn't even all that different considering I used the economic one. Your base assumption here is false. You allege that a company can't have a monopoly unless there's nobody to cooperate with. But you don't have to own
all the business in the universe to have a monopoly. Example:
Wicked Person Airlines owns all the airlines while Evil Person Industries owns all the steel mills. When Friendly Phil tries to set up an airline of his own, Wicked Person Airlines asks Evil Person Industries to deprive him of steel to make his planes. Friendly Phil promptly goes out of business for lack of planes.
By your reasoning, cooperation between Wicked Person and Evil Person proves that there's competition because otherwise there would be nobody to cooperate. This is obvious false, Wicked Person has a monopoly on airlines and Evil Person on steel mills. They cooperate to prevent competition, they do not compete with each other.
Further this is an extremely close simile to what we actually saw happen IRL. Non-competing social media like Twitter vs. Tiktok vs. Facebook don't hit each other, because they have
different products and thus don't actually compete, videos are not substitutable with texts. However when actual competition appears in the form of a social media that provides the
same product, for instance Hatreon vs. Patreon or Parler vs. Twitter, suddenly the monopoly is threatened and we see a third party cut off infrastructure access and starve them out. Now we can't specifically prove collusion, granted, but as it's happened repeatedly it's a deeply suspicious and suggestive pattern.
Further if a company merely owns most of a field and has enough market share to act monopolistically and distort the market away from free-market competition, I'm willing to call that monopoly even if
technically it's not because there's some other company with a small percentage share out there and
technically monopoly means 100% control. I'm not interested in semantic gotchas.
Prove that content creators make money based on their following, not on the specifics of what they create? or something else?
Prove that having different products, such as videos vs. extremely short bits of text, is insignificant to the question of whether said extremely different products compete or not.
