Spitballing possibilities -- in a brainstorming session, someone thought it'd be cool and drive up user engagement to have an online status, so users could talk

Spitballing possibilities -- in a brainstorming session, someone thought it'd be cool and drive up user engagement to have an online status, so users could talk to each other. Or an engineering team trying to preserve its function presented this idea. It then gets built, but business owners know that it will never get used if it's off by default, so they set it to on. Either way, the mechanisms of a platform drive its culture. After people get used to this, people will respond to the ones who are online more than those offline. So people will stay online because they want replies to their comments. This will indeed drive up engagement, but as with Facebook's like button and YouTube's video recommendation algorithm -- this is not a feature that drives up engagement by making people want to stay. It's one that feeds on a person's psyche to make them feel like they can't leave.