I was just now browsing reddit, (specifically a subreddit which copies posts from tumblr, not helping the idea that 90% of the internet is four social media sites linking to eachother,) and I found an incredibly useful term I think others would be interested in:

Wimp-Lo Internet Theory: The internet is full of people who were trained to argue wrong, as a joke.

The idea is, when the reward for a post is engagement, you’re incentivized to make the dumbest possible takes, to encourage the most engagement. Good arguments are hard to counter-argue, so fewer people are likely to engage. Bad or nonsensical arguments are easy and draw in the most engagement.

I don’t have much to add here, it’s a pretty straight-forward definition and it explains a lot about the kind of things you’re bound to see browsing the internet. Like Bikeshedding and Cunningham’s Law state, people love nothing more than to prove they’re smarter when there’s absolutely nothing at stake, and algorithms which boost these kinds of behaviors teach us to repeat them more and more.