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1. Introduction
Short-form videos are an emerging social medium in the era of Web 2.0, where users create online short-form videos through the app platform and realize sharing and collaborating functions (Kuss and Griffiths, 2017). Users can create short-form videos of their lives, ranging from seconds to minutes, including songs and dances, trips, pets and short stories (Zhang et al., 2019). Simultaneously, users can also browse and like others' videos and become their fans. According to a 2019 semiannual report on a short-form video released by Quest Mobile Research, the total number of users of various short-form videos in China exceeded 820 million by June 2019 (Mobile, 2019). With a monthly per capita use time of over 22 h, short-form videos have surpassed mobile games as the industry with the longest monthly per capita use time and the highest year-on-year growth rate under the pan-entertainment scenario. A typical short-form video platform, TikTok, has been downloaded approximately 1.6 billion times globally (Yurieff, 2019), with 486 million monthly active users in China alone in June 2019 (Mobile, 2019). The value of short-form videos in marketing (Costa-Sanchez, 2017) and information communication (Bi and Tang, 2020) has been increasingly recognized. However, they have also created several adverse societal problems, such as privacy concerns and Internet violence. One of the most prominent problems in practical short-form video usage is user addiction (Zhang et al., 2019), which is likely to have adverse effects on peoples' work, lives and health (Andreassen and Pallesen, 2014).
Technology addiction has been extensively studied in the field of information systems (IS). Current research on addiction has mainly focused on the antecedents of addiction. The effects of psychological changes (Lee et al., 2021), social factors (Kuss and Griffiths, 2011) and personal characteristics (Lee et al., 2019) on addiction have been verified. However, few scholars have paid attention to the core of IS, i.e. technology, and explored addiction from the technical perspective. Among the limited number of studies, Lee et al. (2021) discussed the impact of MMORPG features on hedonic effects and addiction in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) environment. Gong et al. (2019) developed a model explaining how functional and symbolic features are associated with the Honor of Kings addiction....