[cratermoon]

They also just need to provide enough stimulus to the users to keep them engaged. Whether that means posting, commenting, or just refreshing their feed, the end result is a) the user counts as active and b) the user is contributing, for free, to the overall content that gives the userbase as a whole a reason to keep coming back.

The 'secret' I learned from AdTech is that while the social media companies do need, to some extent, to be able to show their customers that buying ads provides value, what the social media companies need for themselves is just to keep the users engaged and coming back, generating content (posts and comments) for free so that there are pages in which to place ads and generate impressions.