The Slough of Respond
What is Reply Syndrome?
A perpetual problem in social spaces online is the overwhelming imbalance between people willing to post unprompted and people willing to comment on or criticize the posts of others. Neurological research has revealed that this is more than just laziness: it is a condition known as Reply Syndrome (RS.) People affected by RS lack the neural structures necessary to begin a conversation, but can live happy, productive lives if the condition is well managed.
Untreated RS can have serious consequences: to those affected, creative inspiration and insight is psychic pressure without a relief valve. They can only comment frantically on the posts of others in a futile attempt to express something original. Risk factors are personal, but anything from a photo of a beautiful woman to the latest political news can trigger an episode lasting hours to weeks. Symptoms of an episode include:
- Physical agitation.
- Mental distress and an inability to concentrate.
- Compulsive and nonsequitous reply posting.
Protecting our Users with RS
To protect the mental health of our users, this platform has developed algorithmic RS episode detection. Using interaction data and sentiment analysis, we are able to detect 95% of RS episodes within three interactions of onset.
Once an episode is detected, an affected user may have their feed adjusted to be subtly less inspiring.
- Photos and other images are slightly desaturated.
- Sentences are edited to end with a period, and emoji are removed.
- Terrible and beautiful content is algorithmically suppressed.
In addition, the replies posted by users during an RS episode will not be visible to other users, and calming simulated interactions will be performed.
These measures have reduced the length of the median RS episode on this site by 13%, and the number of interactions they perform by 35%. When the system detects that the user has returned to normal, the algorithm will again begin serving them their normal, engaging content.