What if the focus of Beehaw and/or Lemmy in general is not as a link aggregation platform but instead a community of topic discussion? People are rewarded for posting links to articles with upvotes which only gives incentive to continue posting the same not-read content that they think the respective subs will like (upvote).

I think that clickbait titles are effective because they trigger an emotional response. We have more or less same brains with same biases and heuristics as users on other platforms. So I don't think that this system can work, people will continue posting and upvoting such content. Fast and strict content moderation, however, could be effective.