I’ve noticed YouTube specifically has become more addictive, I never used to be one to sit and scroll for long durations before but I often catch myself spending way too long on shorts now
Even people or older generations seem to be getting sucked in nowadays
Shorts (tiktoks, reels) are designed to do just that, hook you in and keep you scrolling.
It’s like a constant rolling cliffhanger.
Has its good sides - not everything can or should be a long format video. However, I think the scale is tipped too much towards shorts recently. There is not enough time in shorts to formulate a proper statement, so they need to stretch over multiple parts.
My biggest dislike is the separation of context - shorts and longs are completely separate in Youtube even by the same creator, and the most popular platform TikTok, doesn’t even support longer videos.
Personally I think the problem is that YouTube promotes them so much harder than normal videos
If you look at the homepage of YouTube on mobile you get one normal video, then a row of ~6 shorts, then another normal video and so on
Much more likely to pique your interest showing you so many more shorts vs videos and once you’re in it’s difficult to break free