newjackcity0987 t1_jdckk5e wrote on March 23, 2023 at 1:01 PM

Reply to comment by GTthrowaway27 in The average TikTok user in the US is an adult 'well past college age,' CEO says by djJAMZ

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

GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcmi3k wrote on March 23, 2023 at 1:16 PM

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…

newjackcity0987 t1_jdcocb1 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 1:30 PM

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

GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcquu3 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 1:48 PM

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

SomethingMatter t1_jdek9hh wrote on March 23, 2023 at 8:48 PM

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

GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcr6ev wrote on March 23, 2023 at 1:51 PM

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

newjackcity0987 t1_jdcrwvf wrote on March 23, 2023 at 1:56 PM

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

GTthrowaway27 t1_jdcunwg wrote on March 23, 2023 at 2:15 PM

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

SomethingMatter t1_jdekli9 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 8:50 PM

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.