[csnover]

While I agree the parent is oversimplifying the connection between engagement and ad revenue, I would say that there is also an oversimplification in the way you represent the usefulness of engagement to the company and the people working there.

First, when a company has shitty earnings, what metrics do they typically use in their investor reports to make the company still look palatable? New user acquisitions. Increased engagement. It doesn’t matter that the engagement is not generating money because it still lets them say “well, we lost a billion dollars this quarter, but user engagement is up 80% YOY so things are looking good for the future! (Please keep buying our stock/fund our next round!)”

Second, engineers working at a social networking company can’t directly influence what advertisers spend, but they can influence the behaviour of users, and leverage that for personal gain. “Look at how valuable I am, I developed this enhanced rage generating machine that increased engagement by 20% in A/B testing! Give me the big bonus now!” It’s a much harder sell to say “hey, Boss, I deleted a feature which was causing immeasurable subjective harm to society! It probably caused 100,000 users to delete their accounts and move to Gab! Give me the big bonus now!”