Never had TikTok, but that's exactly what I thought when Youtube introduced Shorts and I found myself spending long sessions in them.

However, now I think it's the same infinite scroll we already had in twitter and reddit -- but instead of text and images, now it's just videos.

At the beginning the content was really dumb and bad, but after some time it became way better. Now my feed is basically cooking recipes, chemistry experiments, interesting physics facts, bits from my favorite comedians, etc. Maybe Youtube learned my tastes, or maybe the content creators learned how to exploit better the platform. Either way I'd say I'm happy with the result now.

I still think some people are getting brainwashed by certain content, but in the same way as they were getting brainwashed in twitter and reddit.