Insidious

Installing a ‘shorts blocker’ was so good for my mental health.

Corrected:

Youtube: terrible for those with ADHD

I feel like there's an additional intent there. Short bursts of dopamine in quick succession are a pretty addicting drug, and thus making people more distracted and sedated, and if they don't have ADHD, they may get the same focus troubles people with ADHD have.

If you must consume those, I strongly advise to at least redirect to places autoplay or replay isn't triggered. In Youtube's case, there are browser plugins for redirecting, yt-dlp, mobile and PC players, etc.

And expanding a bit, since it's not a problem exclusive to Google...

For TikTok and Odysee, I don't consume their short-format videos so can't comment on those. And for Loops, part of the fediverse, watching externally, e.g. on Mastodon, should give the video in a plain form, without the addicting features.

just search for "ublock youtube shorts blocker" and thank me later

Another reason I have shorts hidden with untrap

I acquired a script that simply automatically makes YouTube shorts into regular videos. I still hate the shorts feature but this makes it slightly less bad. Literally all you have to do is take the word shorts out of the videos URL and it turns it into a regular video player. I really hate how they just all loop for no reason

Do you use YouTube app/web? Or non Google fetch servoce like grayjay? Try that if you have not.

i thought most platforms did this -- mine do.

Doesn't it usually use the previous Short when it does that? I thought it was another one of Youtube's annoying bugs

I use the ImprovedTube browser extension which has a feature to turn all shorts into regular videos, it has saved me so many times from accidentally starting a doomscrolling session.