What makes people engaged and what people want are not the same thing by definition. If you want to state they are, you should say why you think it.
I agree that it's not, but long-term desires are not all that people have.
> many would argue
Maybe, maybe not, but I would disagree.
> that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.
"freely" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. And a discussion about that is philosophical. They're as free to make that decision as they are to make any other.
Those things are literally the result of human and automated research on how to make people read/share content. I wonder what is your definition of "forced".
They aren't forcing you to keep your eyes open and see the content on their sites
Your computer can open another web page. You can get off the seat.
Tired of seeing garbage clickbait articles? Block the sites which post that stuff.
Tired of conspiracy theories and gossipy articles? Block the sites and mute/unfollow those people.
Tired of experiencing the world in 140 character chunks? Get off Twitter.
Personally I try to go out of my way to purchase books directly from the author, publisher, a book store with a local presence, and online retailers in that order.
I’ve mostly cut Barnes and Nobel out of my vendor list for this exact reason, their book shelves are full of products I have no interest in - walking into their store has such a high noise to signal ratio that, unless I place my order in advance for a specific product, I don’t bother walking in anymore. The books of value are buried on shelves drown out by heavily marketed pop culture noise; and that’s if I’m lucky, often I have to have it ordered and shipped to store to pick it up locally. They don’t meet my needs for content discovery so I don’t do business with them very often.
> In other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic.
I think OPs point is valid if the algorithm is really just giving humans more of what they want. In other words, if the engagement metric really is responding to how humans prefer to spend their time, this really is a view into what a more technically democratic society looks like.
Personally, I don't like the idea of that and would prefer the thought that these algorithms really are measuring the wrong thing!
To highlight the point I'm making, assuming the above is true, your stance could be summed up as: "yes, humans prefer this content, but we know better and will make the right decision on their behalf"
To re-enforce a sibling comment, being able to choose your own algorithm is exactly how you tease apart these two takes. Twitter supports this (chronological vs. engagement) - I personally opt for chronological. I'd be interested to see the stats on usage of that!