They are trying to push engagement. But not just any engagement. You might think that they would prefer active engagement, when you search for a thing and watch the entire thing. But you are actually more likely to skip ads when you do that.

What they prefer is more passive engagement, when you just accept the best thing the algorithm pushes. Because then you are not only more likely to passively consume ads, but also be served content that they were paid to promote.

TikTok, Shorts, and all the things like that seem to be specifically engineered to exhaust your ability to request more things and let the algorithm take over what you watch next. That’s their endgame.