Long ago, tech giant CEO's realised that recommendation systems are very powerful. They can trick hundreds of millions of users into spending double digit percentages of their life watching memes.

From that point on, focus was reduced on working on recommenders. Instead the goal was not to trick users into spending their whole life on the platform, but to maximize ad revenue from those users in the limited time they did spend on the platform.

The one party that wasn't part of this was tiktok. And that's why they have stolen so much user share.