Comment by ndriscoll

The sites that are there for ad impressions already worked this way though. The incentives were geared toward poor human discussion as well (c.f. reddit as a best case, and e.g. instagram/tiktok/youtube as what they'd like to be). So the problem here is ads, a desire to grow to include the entire world to show them ads, and a desire to do whatever it takes to keep their attention to show them ads.