There is more than one way to give people what they want, and in my haste I clumsily muddled two of them. All the platforms are being moderated heavily with thumbs on the scales to advantage one group over another.
My personal preference would be to have no thumbs on the scales.
Additionally I hate TikTok for the intentional addictive mechanism that requires an attention 'ante' to find out if a video is interesting by preventing jumping to a later point in the video to see where it is going. Basically gambling but with attention instead of currency, the algorithm optimized to give the user just enough to keep them coming back but not too much to satiate their desires.
Search Science is one of those research domains where it appears things are going backwards, google barely works anymore, facebook videos was terrible from the start and AFAIK stayed that way, YouTube only works for me because I have a subscribe list to people I support on Patreon. Amazon is being flooded with duplicate listings which should be trivial to de-dupe and clean up but I guess they suck at search science as well. If Amazon doesn't fix their search and fake good problem people might as well buy from Temu. Almost forgot, Twitter can't find bots that are so easy to find that they become 'X in bio' memes.
FWIW, you can fast forward or jump to any point in a TikTok video - just start dragging on the bottom of the screen and a scrubber will appear. Or tap to pause and a playback bar will dispay.
In practice, you are right that there is an attention ante; most videos are short enough to sit through them to see the payoff without making the effort to scrub.
My personal preference would be to have no thumbs on the scales.
Additionally I hate TikTok for the intentional addictive mechanism that requires an attention 'ante' to find out if a video is interesting by preventing jumping to a later point in the video to see where it is going. Basically gambling but with attention instead of currency, the algorithm optimized to give the user just enough to keep them coming back but not too much to satiate their desires.
Search Science is one of those research domains where it appears things are going backwards, google barely works anymore, facebook videos was terrible from the start and AFAIK stayed that way, YouTube only works for me because I have a subscribe list to people I support on Patreon. Amazon is being flooded with duplicate listings which should be trivial to de-dupe and clean up but I guess they suck at search science as well. If Amazon doesn't fix their search and fake good problem people might as well buy from Temu. Almost forgot, Twitter can't find bots that are so easy to find that they become 'X in bio' memes.