I know that VHS tapes aren’t great, but I’ve found that having a limited supply of physical media actually makes me more likely to watch things.
Browsing through a collection at the library or a friends house, it’s shocking how quickly you find that people will converge on “oh, let’s watch this!” rather than endlessly scrolling through thumbnails and previews on Netflix and never committing
When watching stuff with friends, we pre-curate a list of perhaps 20, or fewer, titles so the "deciding which things we might watch" part is out of the way and, worst case, we can just easily select one at random and know it's something we wanted to watch.
We do this because of the very effect you mention: otherwise, we'll burn enough time to watch a good chunk of a movie, just scrolling.
I have my watch list for movies, usually recommendations from friends, youtube channels, blogs, news and so on. The recommendation algorithms aren't fair with good movies that receive the same attention as bad movies. And, well, if I watch some sci-fi movies they think that I only like sci-fi and start recommending bad movies, when probably I would be more happy to just watch Shrek.
But something that I miss is just findings something at random. Lots of movies and bands that I like would never be recommended to me by those algorithms.
Browsing through a collection at the library or a friends house, it’s shocking how quickly you find that people will converge on “oh, let’s watch this!” rather than endlessly scrolling through thumbnails and previews on Netflix and never committing