[maplethorpe]

You're conflating engagement farming and rage-baiting. Engagement can be both positive and negative. I can't find any online sources that agree with your definition.

Here's one that I think sums it up pretty well:

"Engagement farming refers to a range of deceptive practices on social media designed to artificially inflate engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and followers."

"Engagement farming employs various tactics to exploit social media algorithms, with the intent to appear more popular than actual user interest would warrant. Examples include posting controversial content to provoke emotional responses, repurposing successful posts without originality, and using automated systems for mass liking or following." [1]

If you don't think this is happening on HN (especially to mass downvote posts) you're naive.

[1] https://www.isme.in/engagement-farming-prof-sriram-prabhakar...

[walletdrainer]

Maybe look at how people actually use it? Not sure why the Indian blogspam is worth looking at.

"Engagement" has a specific meaning. It's different from "like farming" or "karma farming". Some platforms specifically reward engagement, making it a reasonable thing to farm on those platforms.

> using automated systems for mass liking or following

Clearly the author was clueless, this has nothing whatsoever to do with engagement farming.