>Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.

Having lived trough all the same i'd say the exact opposite and i'd even add that phones add a constant presence element that is a differernt factor but still i'd say theres a very noticable difference.

And if we look past our own experiences the reason why is fairly straightforward. The whole point of the algorithm is to make it more addictive. All those companies would not spend their time and effort on it otherwise if it did not help on this front. And the fact that they spent quite a lot of research on it and make it quite intricate with lots of computation involved and the fact that it is quoted plenty as the reason for new players such as tiktok coming to prominence should tell you it's a quite impactfull one.