I think it's a conglomeration of issues _including_ unaligned incentives of the companies vs their users. The fact that they're nearly all self curated profiles

I think it's a conglomeration of issues _including_ unaligned incentives of the companies vs their users. The fact that they're nearly all self curated profiles is a symptom of the former. The core "Apps" don't want the real you with all your idiocracies and flaws, that won't sell the most subscriptions. They want the heavily curated "you", which inevitably becomes a bait and switch for someone else when the idealized you is replaced by IRL you. With the newer generations fully online for their lifespans, it may be an interesting (and dystopian) exercise to use a specially trained LLM with hooks into social platforms, long form writing, etc to "summarize" ones "life corpus" instead of relying entirely on self reporting and curated images. PS I'm half joking half not.