Good article, though I think it missed explicitly making the point that the reason "engagement" is the metric is because that's what platforms monetize. Engagement is a euphemism for attention, and social platforms exist to sell your to advertisers.
Since the article is written for "community builders," understanding that engagement is a metric to quantify the advertising potential of a platform should make it obvious that people who aren't in the business of selling attention to advertisers don't need to copy social media and optimize for engagement; instead they should target better measurements of value creation for their community. Of course Goodhart's law[1] still applies.
Since the article is written for "community builders," understanding that engagement is a metric to quantify the advertising potential of a platform should make it obvious that people who aren't in the business of selling attention to advertisers don't need to copy social media and optimize for engagement; instead they should target better measurements of value creation for their community. Of course Goodhart's law[1] still applies.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
(edited for readability)