This is pretty interesting, but I've always thought that the sensationalist side of social media exacerbates this issue. Everyone is driven by clicks, so writing with a sense of urgency (not necessarily extremism) will drive your interaction up. It's part of what makes social media so exhausting these days: a billion users are all jockeying for your attention, and you need to trust that Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/$OTHER_SITE will direct your focus to the things that matter. And when everything "matters", nothing does. We've become desensitized to importance, and I imagine it will have a considerable impact on the future of journalism and how we interact with it.