Humans crave hierarchical signaling. Instagram, TikTok, Match group, the entire industry have invested millions of dollars into implementing every cutting edge brain-hack they can think of. They've nurtured in us a dependence on their contorted, amplified presentation of society and our sociosexual value. Year in, year out, just as the house always wins, the dopamine sink always leans in their favor.
It's primally addicting to seek concrete quantifiers of status or worth: how many DM's you get, how many likes, how many matches. As complex as the human social brain is, its measures of meaning can often collapse on single numbers because they signal something irreducible: just exactly how cool, hot, likable, valuable or important you really are. The end game of all gossip is to glean something close to these numbers, in one way or another. In real life there's always layers of illusion and nuance, but online we are presented the truth, unflinchingly.
I think people really have to grapple with something often hard to accept: there's no reason why the human social consciousness has to be good, ultimately kind, or benign. There's a possibility that the essential elements of our psyches that apps and social media have exploited aren't really all that pleasant when laid out in the open. Maybe all our whims and lusts can end up being very bad to many people through no fault of their own. Maybe there is an essential, evolutionary ugliness to human nature behind the façade of cordial, inoffensive pleasantries. In the end, we become miserable, because our mental heuristics have been granted power they never should have. Algorithmic bliss has allowed us to be far too human.