Comment by cosmic_cheese

The effect is much stronger than it has to be due to how these services have been optimized for increasing engagement at the cost of all else.

In more traditional places of online discussion, things like flamebait is at minimum penalized and often deleted. Posters with strong tendency towards incivility and outright falsehoods get banned. Participating with one’s lizard brain at the wheel is strongly discouraged.

There’s no reason why that can’t be true of social media, too. It could be tuned to elevate content that doesn’t pull people into a degenerative cycle, but that’s not nearly as profitable and so it’s not.