[naravara]

> and engagement was never correlated with quality anyway.

Well it's a different style of engagement and a different standard for "quality" from what we colloquially think of those terms to mean. Traditional media needed you to engage with the media. Social media needs you to engage with the comment section associated with the media. The qualities the system is optimizing for, then, isn't the stuff we typically consider to be good for that medium. Instead it's the stuff that's good for making people talk about it.

This is almost certainly to blame for things always gravitating towards largely subjective evaluations of where something falls on some axis for a highly charged metric. Is this racist or not racist? Queer friendly or unfriendly? Liberal of conservative? Arguing about how to 'keep score' with which boxes any specific bit of media gets is a good way to say something about something topical that keeps people engaged and arguing.

Even in the days of the old blogosphere it was well known that you needed to have a comments section to get the page views. You can only crank out so many articles as an individual. But you can make your site "stickier" and encourage people to keep clicking the bookmark for it if you can get them engaged with talking about your article. It's not surprise that the most noxious elements of the modern Internet were more-or-less born on Reddit and Tumblr. These were two sites that basically thrived on creating selective pressure for this sort of content.