“What they also have in common is an apparent reluctance to build on existing research about these spaces, or to properly use design thinking to best address the scenarios of use around them.”

Though your phrasing it a bit clunky. I would have phrased it like this:

For over a decade, researchers and practitioners in media have learned greatly about various techniques in online spaces — what benefits the education of the audience, the civility of a community, the democratic ability to address public policy concerns. Lessons unlearned. What’s sufficient for success in mega-sites like Huffington Post and Comment is Free is a more primal need: more buzz and more eyeballs leads to more ad dollars. Which, on further thought, is not much different from the corporate news media as a whole these days.