If we assume a basic “increased vote score = increased reach” algorithm, here’s how two kinds of content play out:

1) Strongly emotional, easy to understand content put in front of an echo chamber: This will get very big upvotes and very big reach as long as you find ways to expand that echo chamber (i.e. apply some demographic/interest matching as you increase reach)

2) Thoughtful, rational content that requires some effort to process, put in front of an audience that is ideologically diverse: This will get less total interactions because you have to think, and they’ll be more evenly split between upvotes and downvotes because of the diversity, so this scenario gets no additional reach.

Now “upvote and add reach to the stuff with the highest score” is just about the simplest interaction mechanism an engineer could have come up with. I am willing to take McLuhan’s “medium is the message” idea to its logical conclusion and say that we stumbled on this outcome, if perhaps not on accident, simply because it was the easiest path to market share and profits.

Going forward as AI gets into the mix, I honestly don’t know what will happen, but I won’t be surprised if the engineering of discourse becomes more subtle. Because I am sure that Zuck and everyone else would love to have less negative attention from Congress.