I don’t agree. Tons of folks spend tons of time influencing for basically no financial gain (or the platform taking the vast majority of it). Attention is everything.

In other cases, people are just tribal, and like following someone.

That’s always been (and will always be) an issue, but the monster of this story is engagement optimizing design. Technology has made this human tendency extremly dangerous, and “engagement at any cost” needs to be a social taboo.