I think the place for comments is in the comment section. If you post an interesting article but include your own commentary which is stupid or absurd, I don't know whether to upvote or downvote.

My opinion: Post the link, don't editorialize the title, put an excerpt from the article if you want, but don't put your comments in the post itself.

I always downvote links to videos with no text.

Be the change you want to see

It's up to the moderators whether to allow those kinds of posts. Sometimes I'll look at the linked article and post a summary (often just the first sentence after the headline) but I'd rather that the original poster was required to do that. I started !savedyouaclick@lemmy.world and made a few posts there, but no one else posted anything, there so it's deserted for now.

What are some ways to encourage posts that are more engaging?

as a volunteer mod that's guilty of linkposting I'd honestly say there's 2 things that would probably encourage fellow linkers to do more which is:

1. Thanking posters who are currently and consistently posting links with additional content/info.
2. Donations
   • honestly financial support goes a long way for higher quality content, like just look at YouTubers or content creators who have Patreon, Kofi, Liberapay in contrast to those who only have sponsors or aren't paid at all

Some mods throw a hissy fit if you post more than a link and a headline that matches the story’s exactly. Some people want more than a link and a headline. You can’t win.

Require a description.

I block that kind of posting, a lot of them are bots.

clients like jerboa can block self-announced bots, which takes care of a lot of them, and if you see the same username posting six posts of questionable quality without any context, you can block them too.

These low effort posts could as well be bot posts.

Posters should think about that: nobody can decide if you are human or bot.

If there are actually bots in the race posting "against you", that is, posting links to contrary articles, then the bots are going to win, because they are more and can post more.

Humans should make sure to be recognized as humans.

It is not hard (yet):

Simply add one or two lines that tell us why you have posted this article, what you find remarkable, or what is your own comment.

How often do you want me to type “I thought this was interesting.”

Probably mostly a carryover from Reddit where it's an either one or the other kind of deal.

It's a symptom of our modern society and the information age we live in. People don't have the time to sit and enjoy a long video, they need a 5 second one to keep their attention.

This research paper explains it far better than I can.

That’s what the title is for. This is a link aggregator.

Use a better front end that summarizes content, like Tesseract.

The community it’s in should tell you why it’s posted.