Ask HN: Does the Twitter algorithm purposefully put a contrarian response first?

2 pointssendos5y ago1 comments

Not sure if people have studied this in detail, but my anecdotal evidence is that when I read a tweet related to politics, the top response is a contrarian one (i.e. disagrees with the tweet)

This is even the case when the comment has fewer responses/likes/retweets than other comments lower down the list.

I can see that the algorithm might be trying to increase engagement, and so it might put the most liked/commented comments on top, but it doesn't seem to do just that.

It seems to also be looking at the 'semantics' of the comment (or maybe the social graph and history of the commenter) and chooses to put the contrarian comment on top.

Maybe a contrarian comment gets the most responses and that's why the algorithm favors it, but I've seen several cases when the top comment was not the most engaged-with.

It's possible this phenomenon is not due to the algorithm but due to bot networks gaming the system and liking the contrarian comment in patterns that make the algorithm put it on top.

Has anyone here noticed this pattern? And what could be the cause of it?

(It certainly makes the discussion on Twitter more polarizing, when the first comment is so often against the tweet even when the comment is not so popular/liked)

1 comments

SamBam5y ago

I'm interested in this as well. I've seen other people's anecdotal evidence, with screenshotted examples, and I've noticed it myself, but I'd love a real study.

If Twitter prioritizes "engagement" then it seems natural that they'd put a response that is more likely to garner a response from you first. You're more engaged if you're writing back an angry refutation of how wrong the first person is, than if you're just hitting "like" on the first person that agrees with you.

But this kind of engagement feels negative to me in the long run. I have certainly gotten myself addicted to political Twitter, and at the same time never feel happy with myself for engaging.

That said, it's also a powerful force: I have two Twitter accounts, one that engages in political discussions, which often leaves me annoyed at the world, and one that just follows makers and artists and things that make me happy. But guess which one I check more often...

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