Is YouTube or Twitch really better? I don't think people are going to go "Oh well, TikTok is gone now, guess I'll finally go read through my backlog of academic papers on quantum theory"

YouTube is has a lot of great educational content. Maybe TikTok is too, I don't use it, but I find most short-form content to be of questionable value.

[edited to change "full" to "has a lot of" because Youtube has plenty of brain-rot too]

Has a ton of short for content too

I'd say it is, if you stay away from shorts.

And every content creator on tiktok isn't going to move over to YouTube and start posting shorts, and every tiktok user isn't going to move over to Youtube and start viewing them?

I guess there IS a theory that the tiktok algorithm is UNIQUELY evil in some way. It's hard to argue against this theory, so if tiktok were temporarily banned, it would be a nice test. I think the theory would be flat-out proven wrong, personally.

Longform youtube is just as slop ridden. Arguably the shorts are more potent because they won't pad with even more slop into these long multi ad break videos of saying nothing ultimately.