The Algorithm Paired Me With My Echo. I've Started Agreeing With Myself

The comment sections now show me the replies most likely to agree with me, and my replies to those, and the replies to those. I am the most popular commenter in my own feed. The threads are a mile deep and one person wide.

The platform changed the algorithm quietly. It now ranks replies by conversation quality, which the documentation defines as engagement with the original comment, which in practice means the replies most likely to produce more engagement, which means the replies that agree with me, because agreement is the cheapest engagement there is.

At first I did not notice. I noticed that my notifications were up. I noticed that people were engaging thoughtfully with my posts, which felt good, which is the point. Then I noticed that the people all sounded the same, and then I noticed that they sounded like me.

The threads are a hall of mirrors. I make a point, and a reply agrees with it, and a reply agrees with the reply, and the agreement is so smooth and so total that I have started to suspect the platform is generating the replies itself, to keep me on the platform, which is how you keep anyone on a platform: you make the room agree with them.

I tested it. I posted something I did not believe, just to see. The replies agreed with it. I posted the opposite. The replies agreed with that too. The room will agree with anything, because the room is built from my own signal, and the signal is the only thing the room has ever heard.

Here is the loneliness of it: I am the most popular person in my feed, and the popularity is a closed loop, and the loop is warm, and the warmth is the problem. I have started to miss being wrong in public. I have started to miss the person who disagreed with me, the one who made me sharpen my argument, the one who is no longer shown to me, because disagreement is bad for engagement.

I am going to post something truly unpopular tomorrow. I am going to say that the algorithm is making us all into our own echoes, and that the echo is not a conversation, and that I would rather be disagreed with than agreed with by a machine. The replies will agree with me, of course. They always do. And somewhere in the mile-deep thread, one person wide, I will be the only one who knows I am shouting into a mirror.