"As demonstrated by engagement" - isn't really true. It's more "As demonstrated by count of time spent in the app". I believe that is true. But it's also a worse experience. Those two really seem to contradict each other, however, it's really quite nuanced.
I'd like to see mostly what my friends are up to. Instead of that, on Facebook at least, I mostly see viral videos from whatever groups I happen to be in. It is true that a lot of the time, those suck me into watching them. Technically that counts as "time spend in the app", but I also see that I'm wasting a lot of my time on crappy pointless videos and because of that I've actually not opened the app at all from time to time. In general, my attitude towards it has also changed - it used to be "ooh, exciting, let's see what's happened", now it's more like "meh, maybe this time there is something interesting, let's check, although probably not". Jaded is probably the correct description.
I realized a while ago that "engagement" is very much the wrong metric to optimize. The reason people optimize for "time spent" or "number of interactions" is because it is easy to measure.
I think ultimately what you need to optimize for is much harder to measure. I think for most senarios it is "value a user can recieve for a given amount of time". When measuring this, time spent in the application is acutally detrimental unless you are increasing the value a user is getting from the application by a substantial amount.
If your theory were true --- that apparent engagement increases really just represent navigational inefficiency --- you'd see drops in other metrics, like user retention and visits. But you don't. What you see is that people use the thing more. It's hard not to interpret that as better.
I'm not saying it's navigational inefficiency - it's giving me useless stuff that's really hard to stay away from. I don't want a platform that gives me a free shot of opium every now and then just to get me to stay there.
I'm quite the person to say that it is useless to me.
I also am quite free to have the opinion that a lot of content is simply a waste of time. I also propose the question of how much actual enjoyment it produces and the quality of said enjoyment. You are free to think otherwise :)
I'd like to see mostly what my friends are up to. Instead of that, on Facebook at least, I mostly see viral videos from whatever groups I happen to be in. It is true that a lot of the time, those suck me into watching them. Technically that counts as "time spend in the app", but I also see that I'm wasting a lot of my time on crappy pointless videos and because of that I've actually not opened the app at all from time to time. In general, my attitude towards it has also changed - it used to be "ooh, exciting, let's see what's happened", now it's more like "meh, maybe this time there is something interesting, let's check, although probably not". Jaded is probably the correct description.