The profit motive simply needs to be rebalanced. Right now, "engagement" wins everything because online advertising is preposterously mispriced. Like, it is more cost-effective for me to put a $70k jumbotron on a busy street corner than it is for me to pay for online advertising within the same demographic reach. Engagement from the Jumbotron? 3x as effective as online advertising. I got eight years of data like this and so does every single advertiser out there but just like the early days of television and the early days of radio, the networks are blowing smoke up everyone's asses. As soon as advertisers accept that Google ads are worth about a tenth what they're paid for, the costs-benefits analysis of provocative online forums go waaaay the fuck down. Frankly, Apple reefing down on their adblocker would probably go a long way towards making things more civil. They basically slaughtered Facebook with a few lines of code.