I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks.
Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to.
Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
There’s a relationship between how social- or video-centric an app is and how well short form video fits into their mix. You can’t shoehorn it in. Not least if you feel obliged to because you paid some ludicrous sum to tout the name.
For example, short form video feels ass-y on Reddit. It feels okay on YouTube, even if you don’t engage with it.
Can't they make a TikTok-like app with a subreddit as a backend? So ppl get same content but with a different front-end?
So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.