I'm really glad that for whatever reason my brain has completely rejected short-form content. It seems to be a serious problem for a lot of people. I don't understand it the same way I don't understand heroin addictions. My mind is just screaming "STOP DOING IT" and cannot get passed that concept very far.
You're on HN, though. In some sense, reeling in people like you has been a solved problem for decades, since forums were invented.
I apologize for what is doubtless egregious projection on my part.
I am like you in the sense that I seem "immune" to TikTok/Reels, especially relative to my wife, who can definitely get sucked into it for 30-60 minutes. However, I'm easily-snared by things like "the last year of drama in the NixOS community". I can easily spend an hour I don't have reading forum threads in which people are accusing moderators of abusing their position in a forum about a piece of technology I don't use.
So in some sense the tech industry didn't need to "innovate" in order to suck me in. I was getting sucked into reading about web forum drama 20 years ago.
for me its because i browse hn and the overwhelming cynicism "tastes" much worse than the entertainment provided
I find the shorts on youtube super addictive, but the algo is too repetitive. I once watched a drumming video to then end, not I get heaps of drumming. It's cool, but I'm just not that into drumming.
I've been trying to correct the algo but giving a down thumb to videos I don't want to watch but its not learning.
The trick of short form video isn’t the content itself but the channel flipping, hunting hook action. Changing the channel is fun when you actually land on something-good in the sea of garbage. And sometimes that something-good is a an endless handkerchief. One that you can keep pulling out good somethings with. Now you feel extra special like you’ve found something novel as you’ve completed the hunt and are satiated. And you keep that endless handkerchief you found. Soon you will have found many novel endless handkerchiefs. You mount them on your profile page like boar heads on a hunters wall. This pride is tied to happiness and you know how to hunt for more.
I highly recommend the book Hooked by Nir Eyal[0]. It is the book that effortlessly detailed how to build short form video networks (as well as other addicting software over the last 10+ years). The people who built this stuff read it and the people who want to stop the addictions should read it.
I find it incredibly more distracting when someone nearby or in the household is watching tiktok or similar within earshot than if they are watching a longer-form video or television program. Seemingly because I can "tune-out" the long form program but every time the video switches with tiktok, my brain "activates" and gets distracted to check if it needs to pay attention or not.