And bad behavior gets rewarded with engagement. We learned this from "reality television" where the more conflict there was among a group of people the more pop

And bad behavior gets rewarded with engagement. We learned this from "reality television" where the more conflict there was among a group of people the more popular that show was. (Leading to producers abandoning the purity of being unscripted in the pursuit of better ratings.) A popular pastime on Reddit is posting someone behaving badly (whether on another site, a subreddit, or in a live video) for the purpose of mocking them. When the organizational goal is to increase engagement, which will be the case wherever there are advertisers, inevitably bad behavior will grow more frequent than good behavior. Attempts to moderate toward good behavior will be abandoned in favor of better metrics. Or the site will stagnate under the weight of the new rules. In this I'm in disagreement with Yishan because in those posts I read that engagement feedback is a characteristic of old media (newspapers, television) and social media tries to avoid that. The OP seems to be saying that online moderation is an attempt to minimize controversial engagement because platforms don't like that. I don't believe it. I think social media loves controversial engagement just as much as the old-school "if it bleeds, it leads" journalists from television and newspapers. What they don't want is the (quote/unquote) wrong kind of controversies. Which is to say, what defines bad behavior is not universally agreed upon. The threshold for what constitutes bad behavior will be different depending on who's doing the moderating. As a result the content seen will be influenced by the moderation, even if said moderation is being done in a content-neutral way. And I just now realize that I've taken a long trip around to come to the conclusion that the medium is the message. I guess we can now say the moderation is the message.