Comment by api

It's more specific than social media. It's engagement maximizing (read: addiction maximizing) algorithms. Social media wasn't nearly as bad until algorithmic engagement maximizing feeds replaced temporal or topic based feeds and user-directed search.

Two people walk past you on the street. One says "hi," and the other strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken. Which one maximizes engagement?

A politician says something sane and reasonable. Another politician mocks someone, insults someone, or says something completely asinine. Which one maximizes engagement?

This is why our president is a professional troll, many of our public intellectuals are professional trolls, and politics is becoming hyper-polarized into raging camps fixated on crazy extremes. It maximizes engagement.

The "time on site" KPI is literally destroying civilization by biasing public discourse toward trash.

I think "trash maximizes engagement" should be considered an established fact at this point. If you A/B test for engagement you will converge on a mix of trolling, tabloid sensationalism, fear porn, outrage porn, and literal porn, and that’s our public discourse.