alt Hacker NewsMeta and ad agencies are definitely incentivized that your ads convert and that engagement is authentic. Otherwise why deal with them at all? SMBs are like 40% of Meta's revenues, the entire world finds the product valuable. It is a little glib to try to make the contrarian case on conversion.
The toxic part of their incentives is that they want businesses to commit large budgets on campaigns whose performance you can measure with very little money spent and very little data.
Yes definitely. But then that last sentence sorta leads to the first question you had- why deal with them at all?
I think it's because despite that toxicity it still seems to be the best ad platform in town. Haven't seen anybody suggest a better alternative. Feels almost monopolistic.