Whose Objective Function Is Engagement?

Introduction: Where the Metric Came From

How to raise your engagement rate, and how to measure it, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the origin of the metric. For whom was this number designed in the first place?

Endless advice exists on raising it, and the question of why it is the metric at all is generally treated as settled before anyone asks. Leave that premise unexamined while learning only how to raise it, and the number starts to feel like your own objective.

Here is the conclusion first. Engagement is a rational metric for a business that collects attention and sells it. It is not a measure of how well a writer conveyed what they meant to convey. The two sometimes coincide and are different in kind. And when they diverge, which one prevails was settled from the start.

What the Number Bundles Together

Engagement is the sum of reader response. Clicks. Completion. Reactions. Comments. Shares. Dwell time.

A platform’s distribution mechanism judges material with a large bundled number to be valuable and allocates it more widely. Material with a small number has its allocation squeezed and sinks.

So engagement is not merely a measurement. It is a condition of distribution. Fail to produce the number and you never step onto the floor at all. That distinction matters later.

Why This Metric and Not Another

Why this one? The answer falls out of the business structure.

A platform earns by selling collected attention as advertising. A large engagement number means more attention drawn to the material — and to the place carrying it. Longer dwell time and more reactions mean more attention to sell, at a higher price.

So maximising engagement is entirely rational as a business. There is nothing deceitful about it. No one is trying to trick the writer.

The problem lies elsewhere. That rationality is rationality with respect to the platform’s objective function, not yours. That is the whole of it.

What Happens When Objective Functions Diverge

What is maximised is engagement, not the worldview you want to convey.

The two do sometimes coincide. There are genuine moments when the thing you most wanted to say happens to draw a large response. But that is a coincidence, not an identity.

The decisive difference is which one you take when they diverge.

When you learn that what you most want to say does not generate response: a writer whose origin is inward writes it anyway. A writer whose origin is outward drops it and switches to what performs. And no one holds both origins at once. Writing a single piece, the origin is either inward or outward.

This is not abstract. Suppose you write your most important argument, something you have thought about for a long time, into one piece. It felt right. Almost no response came. That same week, a throwaway line you posted without much thought performed unusually well. Which of the two will you take as your basis next week?

The fork is already present inside that ordinary week. And the metric pushes your back, at every one of those decisions, in the same direction: towards whichever performed.

The Weight of Being a Condition of Distribution

Return to the point flagged earlier. Engagement is not a measurement but a condition of distribution.

The difference is decisive. A mere measurement can be ignored — you can decline to step on the scale. A condition of distribution cannot: fail to produce the number and your words do not reach readers at all.

Fitting yourself to the metric is therefore not a matter of vanity but a structural requirement for arriving. This is exactly why the resolve to stop caring about numbers fails. It is not a question of caring or not caring. It is a question of arriving or not arriving.

And the requirement acts equally on people with no interest in recognition. Someone entirely indifferent to the opinions of others, who holds only the reasonable wish that one more person read what they think — and whose only route to readers is this distribution — will shape their work towards what the metric favours in order to reach more people. Not because they want approval. Because they want to arrive. That reasonable choice moves the origin outwards.

Where the Metric Becomes After-the-Fact Information

The question, then, is not how do I raise the metric but is this metric a condition of arrival, or information available after arrival?

A path where readers have entrusted you with their contact details — a path that reaches them directly — has numbers too. Open rates. Unsubscribes. So the same optimisation just starts again, one might object. Reasonably.

There is a decisive difference. Those numbers are not a condition of distribution but after-the-fact information. On borrowed ground, response was a gate standing before your words reached anyone; without producing the number you could not step onto the floor, so moving the origin outwards became a structural requirement for arriving. On an owned path, arrival is already assured. An open rate is information you learn after arriving, not a condition of arriving.

So no pressure to maximise it arises from the structure. A writer can of course decide, of their own accord, to shift towards headlines that lift open rates. But that is the writer’s choice, not the structure’s compulsion. Between compulsion and choice there is a distance that does not close.

Conclusion: Before Raising It, Ask Whose Metric It Is

Trying to raise engagement is not, in itself, a mistake. It becomes one when you mistake it for your own objective.

The metric is a rational design for a business that collects attention and sells it, and it is faithful to that business’s objective function. Yours was somewhere else.

Swap in a single question. Not how do I raise this but is this number a condition of arrival, or information that follows it? Move to a place where the answer changes, and your relationship to the metric changes at the root.

The whole picture is gathered in why blogging longer leaves less of your own voice. On how this metric moves the origin, see the more you master the algorithm, the more it corrects you; on what maximising it produces, inflammatory topics travel further by design.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Simon, H. A. “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (1971) Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 37–72
• Deci, E. L. “Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18(1) (1971)

Books

• Wu, T. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016) Knopf