I would agree that dumb clickbait articles are counter-productive in social media networks where the stated purpose of those networks is to foster genuine connection between the members. Namely on Facebook.
Facebook likes to boast that it has cornered the market on genuine connections. For example, their recent video campaign, where you could pick a person, a greeting, and make one of your friends the same specialized video that every other person on Facebook was also making. And everybody made one for their boyfriend and no one else. Which, was, of course, basically hilarious because even though the language was meant to seem heartfelt and meaningful, it nearly seemed like a break-up video due to the fact that it was so very impersonal an vague.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that the largest social network is not now, nor could it ever be genuine. Not that the Internet can’t foster genuine connection, just that Facebook, for the very reason that it’s trying so extra hard to make genuine connection it’s bread and butter, can never be that place.
Other social networks, ones that have less lofty goals than genuineness, tend to foster more real connections. Twitter, for example, was started as a way to track taxis and traffic patterns, then was modified in order to get up-to-the-minute news updates. Tumblr is actually for click-bait, and almost exclusively click-bait, and yet, it still fosters more community than Facebook these days.
The trick is to not be about connection, but to foster connection. The light-touch, as it were. Something Facebook forgets more and more every day.