Upton Sinclair
Things will keep getting worse in the US as long as the current nothing is anti-competitive policies endure.
Products optimize for engagement specifically when they exist within the attention economy and their monetization model is serving ads and/or harvesting user data. If Porsche and Rolex can sell you cars and watches you almost never use, I'm sure they're fine with that.
This still exists and I get it every day. It is the floor for my feed. I have to refresh or close the app and reopen to fetch more.
In other words, even if they didn't know that what they were doing was harmful, they should have.
It's not relevant to this discussion that in certain contexts, useful engagement metrics exist that supposedly aren't toxic, because it doesnt apply to the current context. We're clearly talking about the larger systemic issue of companies maximizing all engagement at all costs, and the consequences of such a policy.
It's not the measurement that is toxic. It's what measures you optimize for that can become toxic.