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
That's still pretty hit or miss for me. I've watched a video about cats exactly once a few weeks ago when my cat did something strange, and my recommendations are still littered with click-bait videos about certain cat behaviors. I watch tons of the aforementioned hour long analysis videos and I still need to resort to playlists compiling them instead of getting recommendations. To me, it seems the algorithm really wants to push certain types of content and will flood me with them if I so much as hover a video too long. But it really dislikes other types of content and almost hides them on purpose, despite me liking them. My best guess would be that longer videos have less ads per minute of content and are therefore not recommended as much, but I couldn't tell, I started blocking ads on Youtube when they added a second ad banner back in the day - long before video ads were a thing.
I have premium so maybe that’s a reason. Also, if I watch a video I know YouTube will latch unto them I remove it from my watch history and heavily use not interested option.