for the last few month i've been trying to figure out what sort of game people are playing with the ragebait stories on advicecolumn-esque subs (AITAH, AIO, etc

for the last few month i've been trying to figure out what sort of game people are playing with the ragebait stories on advicecolumn-esque subs (AITAH, AIO, etc). if you read one story in isolation, it seems fine. you'll think that it's a wild story (which is why it was worth sharing) that probably has a bit of dramatic license, but fine. but if you binge through the top posts, you'll start to notice all sorts of common tropes and patterns and they all seem fake and formulaic. the stories are highly effective and hooking people in, so much so that there's a whole genre of cross-platform slop posts where somebody screenshots reddit threads into facebook for driving engagement. but the posts dont feel bot/LLM-made, but it does feels a lot like some group of people are mixing-and-matching different scenarios to do... something. and i want to know what the something is. - is it purely an engagement farm (if so, what's the value in accruing non-transferrable reddit karma?) - is it some sociological experiment that's trying to understand the reddit psyche? - or is it that lots of different individuals genuinely just enjoy a creative writing challenge?