You're conflating engagement farming and rage-baiting. Engagement can be both positive and negative. I can't find any online sources that agree with your definition.

Here's one that I think sums it up pretty well:

"Engagement farming refers to a range of deceptive practices on social media designed to artificially inflate engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and followers."

"Engagement farming employs various tactics to exploit social media algorithms, with the intent to appear more popular than actual user interest would warrant. Examples include posting controversial content to provoke emotional responses, repurposing successful posts without originality, and using automated systems for mass liking or following." [1]

If you don't think this is happening on HN (especially to mass downvote posts) you're naive.

[1] https://www.isme.in/engagement-farming-prof-sriram-prabhakar...