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coach_carter2 t1_jdb9npb wrote

average age is meaningless less here. i’m more interested in median age.

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GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcgstf wrote

Why? It’s not like there are big outliers with people living 10,000 years… can’t imagine it’s too different

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SomethingMatter t1_jddvpw6 wrote

Because toddlers and babies don't use something like TikTok and there is no upper limit on the age to skew the average upwards. There is also the problem where a lot of you people stick in fake ages. Back on point, though. You don't need a 10k person to skew the age up. I gave an example in another comment where a couple of 46 year old people can skew an average with a majority school aged group up to 22. Here it is:

If you have 5 x 13 year olds, a 15 year old, a 16 year old, a 22 year old and 2 x 46 year old people. That averages out to 21 years with the median being 14 years.

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newjackcity0987 t1_jdckk5e wrote

Except there are probably way more 65yr olds using tik tok than 2 yr olds so that will skew the average

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GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcmi3k wrote

But if there aren’t any 2 year old users then they’re excluded from the distribution anyways and both mean and median aren’t going to be impacted anyways

And if there are it’s not going to meaningfully affect the mean or median. Unless there’s more 2 year olds online than I expected…

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newjackcity0987 t1_jdcocb1 wrote

It still skews the question of; what age groups are using tik tok?

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GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcquu3 wrote

Of course. Mean and media won’t be exact unless it’s normal, bimodal, etc

But why act as though it’s going to be a meaningful difference?

The CEO is saying the average user is older than you would assume(teenagers/college). That’s it. Even if the median and mean are different by several years, that’s still generally going to be the same point.

It just seems the easy Reddit contrarian point of “um aktually median is better” (hence multiple comments saying the same thing) when they’re probably not that much different to begin with

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SomethingMatter t1_jdek9hh wrote

I can assure you that if the median age was higher than the mean, TikTok would have used that.

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GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcr6ev wrote

Just a pet peeve that Reddit assumes median is always a better representation when we don’t have the actual distribution

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newjackcity0987 t1_jdcrwvf wrote

In this case, do you assume the mean is a better representative than median (without distribution data)?

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GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcunwg wrote

No but I’m saying in this example it doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t need to be precise

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SomethingMatter t1_jdekli9 wrote

The skew of the data matters a lot. The tail on the upper end extends much further than the tail on the lower end which means that the data will more than likely skew right. That would make the median lower than the mean. How much lower depends on the skew of the data but there is a huge difference between a median of 16 and an mean of 25 compared to a median of 22 and a mean of 25.

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EnsignElessar t1_jddpdtq wrote

But what about the mode? Everyone always forgets the mode :(

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Abadazed t1_jdegmj4 wrote

No the average age is meaningless because kids lie about their age on the internet. I haven't used my real age in the decade or so I've been spelunking through the internet I can almost guarantee that hasn't changed with the new generation.

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iceleel t1_jddcaw3 wrote

They are counting on the fact that most people don't know the difference because math is hard.

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