I, and I suspect almost everyone else, do not think that I have ever cared enough to even look at any terms of service for more than a few seconds. I think that the only time I’ve even scrolled past the first few lines is when the site or game required me to scroll through to the end to let me past it. They always are just way too long for me to care about reading for more than just a few seconds. And yes, I know that this could be a bad thing and by agreeing to the TOS, I could easily be signing my rights away to some big corporation.
I do think that companies make their terms of service that long and vague on purpose, that way if someone ever gets banned or suspended, the company can say “well you agreed to the TOS!!!”, knowing that nobody will actually read more than 2-3 lines of it. And because they know this, it allows them to slip in potentially invasive or controversial things that they know won’t be seen, like data collection and other related practices.
I think that if terms of service were simply made shorter and more concise, people would read them much more often than they do now. However, companies never will because, like I said before, the really long and vague TOS allow them to create loopholes and other shady things that allow them to do things that they would never be able to if the terms of service were read more.
