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