Maybe the kids have realised that those pop hits are repetitive and uninteresting...
Plenty of pop music is excellent. But if you give it 30 seconds you will never find out if that’s true.
I, extremely strictly personally, find TikTok ironically un-addictive for this reason: it depletes my attention too fast to get me hooked.
Google has been trying to get me to watch Shorts since they introduced them with little effect.
One day they offer me a video of a Chinese girl transforming into a nine-tailed fox on Shorts which was a good choice for me. After that they want to show me endless AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into all sorts of things on America's Got Talent always with the same music, the same reaction shots, etc.
I tend to look at the recommendation problem as a classification problem [1] but one thing that challenges that is that the answer to "do you want to see more content like this?" is different for content that is 5% of your feed (you relish it) to the very same content if it is 95% of your feed (you're disgusted.) My own answer to the diversity problem [2] is to k-Means the content into 20 clusters and rank the cluster independently so I am always operating at the 5% point.
With ordinary YouTube content I frequently get introduced to something like Techmoan or Jay-Z videos that I can binge with relish the same way I can binge episodes of Shangri-La Frontier season 2. But shorts don't do that for me.
If I was developing a recommendation-based content site based on short content in 2025 I would take a cue from Yostar games and make it so people are actually discouraged from sitting in really long sessions but rather you get them to keep coming back frequently to graze. I'm amazed at how a mechanism like oil in Azur Lane can rescue you from a grindy task right when you are starting to get sick of it forcing you to either engage with some other part of the game or real life for a while. There are a few of us who will spend the holiday break playing Dynasty Warriors 9 or Asgard's Wrath 2 and realize we spent a few work weeks worth of time playing a game, but even then you burn out, I think mobile games are more successful at getting more people to spend more time with games, often with content that is thinner.
[1] ... actually every problem, Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog is not a joke in my pod
[2] which I haven't seen in the literature. I used to think that I didn't understand or believe many ideas in the recommender literature such as "negative sampling", now I think the recommender literature is frequently wrong
Just like modern casino slot machines aren't actually fun despite being made by the exact same companies as very fun arcade and home video games, it's just more efficient/profitable to optimize for the easily addicted.
A casino makes most of it's money from addicts, so why waste any effort/money on making actual "good" anything when they can just press harder on the addiction buttons. Everything in a video slot machine is optimized around pressing the very specific dopamine buttons in a gambling addicts brain, to the point that it is WORSE for those who are less prone to gambling addiction.
In the exact same way, google doesn't care if you watch shorts, you are less profitable than the user who spends all day doomscrolling. So the content isn't optimized for you explicitly because the optimizations that make it more addictive for problem users, and therefore more profitable, are diametrically opposed to making "good" media.
The creative mind behind Spongebob wanted to finish after one season. "It's done, it's good, I like it as art". But Nickelodeon couldn't let that happen because it was a cash cow. So it's gone for like 8 slop filled seasons, that everyone recognizes as "worse" than the first season.
But "Good" has never been as profitable as "Addicting", so any market where you can sell something "Addicting" will be completely filled by addicting slop.
And at the opposite end of the spectrum - I've been using Suno AI to literally extend pop songs I like where the originals are only 60-90 seconds because of gaming the Spotify algorithm :-)
So I would say this feature has so far been worth to me exactly two HN comments.
I know adults who do this. I believe it's a lack of patience created by always available convenience. When nothing is hard it's not worth the focus.
Growing up there was no next/skip/shuffle - pick a radio station and deal with it. That or dub to tape which takes effort, and skipping also takes effort. Same with video games, as another poster mentioned we only got one game at a time so that was our focus. You had the new game and a few old games. Deal with it.
No ones has to deal with much of anything anymore and companies know this. And people dont seem to mind because its so addicting.
Uh, we monetized attention? Like, most of the people on this very board did this.
When you monetize something like that, of course it sets off an arms race and puts pressure on everyone's resources of attention.
The attention economy needs to be eradicated.
A newspaper of yesteryear couldn't print infinite ads. They had roughly a set number of pages, mostly down to the economics of printing itself, and had to find the most valuable advertising to fill that space with.
In the modern day, you can create more space. No longer do you have to curate advertising to ensure it is getting everyone reasonable value, because instead of having a competitive market, everyone just created digital heroin.
Imagine how awful the world would be if literally any shithead with a few dollars could slap a sign down on your front lawn that completely blocked your view and there was nothing you could do about it.
Don't imagine, because that's the very world software developers have built