How do young men really talk, and what do they say about us?

1 in 62

They write five-word lines. Brands write hashtags.

A typical comment is five words. 37% say I, me or we, 27.6% are all lower case, 4.9% end in a full stop, 3.4% swear and 0.2% carry a hashtag. One word in 62 is slang. The service’s own TikTok captions that month ran eight words, with a full stop 35% of the time, first person 5% of the time and a hashtag 92.5% of the time. A competing streamer’s captions already sat at the audience’s rate.

42×

An acted-out bit gets 42 times the views of a sincere post

Across 293 TikToks the median bit, a sketch with a punchline, had 91,850 views. The median sincere or motivational post had 2,171, and the median brand post 1,675. That makes a bit 42 times a sincere post and 55 times a brand post, and the order held in seven of the eight pulls. Per viewer, the like rate is the same: 107 likes per 1,000 views on a sincere post and 106 on a bit. People like the sincere post just as much. It reaches 42 times fewer of them.

5,007,997

Sincere works when a real person is in the frame

Out of 293 posts, one sincere post traveled: a bricklayer’s clip of his 19-year-old apprentice asleep after a 90-day outage, at 5,007,997 views. Sincerity travels when someone real is in the shot, doing something real.

242 vs 3

The comments are the second act

The median most-liked comment under a bit has 242 likes. Under a sincere post it has 3, and under a brand post, 1. For a brand, the reply section under someone else’s bit is often a better stage than its own post.

49%

Half of what the room rewards is a joke

Of the 360 most-liked comments, 49% are a joke of some kind. A quarter play along with the bit: they extend it, quote it back or pitch it as a film (“could be a amazing movie if it was a real movie”, 464,928 likes). A flat verdict is 13.9%, a roast 10.8%, a joke at their own expense 10.6%. Sincere lines are 10.3% of the top comments against 14% of a random sample, so they write sincerely more often than the room rewards it. Questions are 3.9%.

1 in 36

Sarcasm is rare, and it lands

Sarcasm and deadpan are 2.8% of top comments, about one in 36. When it appears it is the second most-liked kind of line, at a median of 9,796 likes. It is aimed at the post and never at other commenters. The most-liked reply under one of the service’s own posts called it bad and promised to watch anyway. Deadpan, and it means “I’m in.”

0

They don’t use the glossary

The crying-laughing emoji is in 63 of every 1,000 comments, more than any word. “Bro” is in 40 per 1,000, then peak (8.3), real (7.9), aura (5.7) and lock in (5.7). The glossary words barely register: unc 0.8, sigma 0.6, skibidi 0.2, and rizz, huzz and gyat at zero. The two most searched slang terms of 2025, at 141,000 and 61,000 searches, show up in one comment and in zero comments, out of 6,622. A 450-term glossary is for sale on X anyway. The words they do use are verdicts they apply to the work: peak, real, cinema, goat.

1.9%

They don’t ask each other what to watch

In a year of r/AskMen, 4,283 questions, 36.7% are about women and dating, 10.9% about being a man, 5.1% about sex, 4.1% about mental health and 3.5% about friends and loneliness. Hobbies, games and entertainment: 1.9%. Just 47 titles ask about entertainment, at a median of one upvote. Among the 57 posters who say they are 18 to 24, the shape holds, with 36.8% on dating. On TikTok the format is the topic: the group chat (22.5 million views on the biggest post), the gym (13.0 million), the boys trip (11.5 million), the fantasy league (692,923).

78,682

They talk about the show inside the show’s own thread

Entertainment comes up under the show itself: 78,682 comments under four trailers on 53.5 million views, and fan edits between seasons at up to 10 million views. The same four moves appear under every trailer: the callback, the lore, the cadence (“At last. A show that comes out every year rather than making us wait 2-3.”, 15,000 likes) and the return (“Guys we are back”, 5,200). They grade the marketing too: 54,000 likes on a note about how the new season should be advertised.

41,403

The service only comes up when it gets in the way

Young men talk about the shows, and rate the service one show at a time. The service itself gets named when something blocks them: ad breaks (46 upvotes on a complaint about one episode), the app (23), and a canceled show (41,403 likes on the news). When they say “cancel”, they mostly mean the show. On the service’s own TikTok, men’s titles got a median of 137,600 views against 675,800 for romance posts, a fifth. A regional desk’s post for one men’s show did 12.1 million views; the home desk’s biggest men’s post did 524,100.

Count before you brief a voice

A voice brief built on a glossary guesses at an audience. A voice brief built on counts (line length, first person, what the top replies are) describes one. Run the same ruler over your own captions and the gap shows up in one table.

Borrowed slang reads as a script

The report cites a 2025 Journal of Marketing Research study that found slang in a brand’s posts cost likes and sales in every age group. Their words are for judging things. A brand that wears them looks like it is trying.

Find the room where your category gets discussed

These young men almost never ask what to watch. They talk inside the show’s own thread. Every category has rooms like this, under the trailer, on the game’s forum, in the book’s reviews, and those rooms are where a brand can join in.