Comment by eterm

I discovered recently that a big part of this is that sites weight photos of text higher than text.

I learned that the LinkedIn meta of photos of posts is because their algorithm de-ranks anything with a link, so for farming you should post a picture of text then follow up with a link to a blog post a day later as a comment reply to the post to double-dip the activity.

And, eurgh, so many bad incentives to just make everything worse.

If you earnestly just post a link to a blog, it weights you don't because they don't want people leaving their feed.

And actual text people spend less time hovering than photos of text, so again, down the ranking your post goes.

I don't spend much time on other social media but if Imgur is all just photos of text that won't be an accident, but it'll be what sites optimise for.