Comment by phailhaus

Like I said: any system that optimizes for engagement has this problem. Advertising revenue scales with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Advertisers are not picking and choosing particular policy positions to place ads on. They're targeting certain demographics, and want to make sure their ads are not next to trash content. So ironically, ads both cause companies to optimize for engagement but they also force moderation.

If you fixate on dropping ads but still optimize for engagement, you get the worst of both worlds.