Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#61

Post by zippergz »

crb wrote: post #40

There are two tiers of Twitter: the early-adopter tech users, who use third-party API clients like Twitterific and Tweetbot, and everyone else. The first bucket has a vastly different Twitter experience. As an API client user I have no ads, no polls, no recommendations or friends likes, no "someone you follow replied" experience. Just a timeline of who I choose to follow, the blissful way it always was. No wonder the…

I don't know if this is such a clean distinction. I have been on twitter since the first 3-6 months that it existed as twitter, and I use the website and first-party mobile apps. Are the ads and recommendations annoying? Yes. But back when I used third-party apps (tons of them over the years, I think starting with Twinkle, and then in some order Tweetie [which became the official app], Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, and probably some I'm forgetting), the experience was bad in lots of other ways. As native photos were added, they didn't display right. As native retweets and quote tweets became a thing, they didn't work. I imagine now with tweet threading, there was at least some gap between the feature existing and the third-party apps supporting it.

Obviously it's a tradeoff, but I found the downsides of the official experience to be less frustrating than the downsides of the third-party experience.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#62

Post by jupp0r »

spectre256 wrote: post #48
lilbobbytables wrote: post #6

"Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself" What am I missing here? There was no harassment of any sort. Alternative headlines could have been: "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you gain more followers" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you drive awareness" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you get more twitter followers for your cause or business" "Twitter has an algorithm that expands…

The missing piece which the Twitter thread author only touched on is that how a tweet is received by a reader depends a lot on whether or not they come from similar communities and have similar context to the author. By surfacing tweets to people that the author doesn't know at all, it's likely the responses will be more negative in general. Anyone with a large twitter following knows roughly what the makeup of their…

I get what you are saying, but isn't this what everyone was screaming for years ago when the filter bubble terminology came up? Now we are criticizing networks for showing things outside of our filter bubbles? You can't have it both ways.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#63

Post by JetSpiegel »

omegaworks wrote: post #51
freehunter wrote: post #7

My business does a lot of posting on Facebook of sometimes controversial things (we're a news site and we sometimes cover local politics). By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. I have ~3k followers on one of my pages. Usually ~200-300 people see any given post if it has no engagements. If it has normal engagement, it might get to 1000-2000 views, st…

The surprising thing about all of this is that sentiment analysis--machine learning algorithms that can interpret the feeling you're trying to convey with your words--is a fairly solved problem. These companies can easily put a filter over this engagement maximization algorithm and they are choosing not to.

Of course, machine can read the commenters' minds, this is a solved problem.

I, for one, welcome our mechanical overlords.

---

https://text2data.com/Demo

This document is: positive (+0.52) Magnitude: 1.39

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#64

Post by ivalm »

benj111 wrote: post #47
freehunter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about banning these posts, or hiding them, or censoring them. Just not showing them as widely as they do other posts. It doesn't even need to go as deep as "this is hateful", but rather "this has the potential to be hateful" or giving the author the ability to control how widely the message is being shared. I see these people here trying to debate solutions like good engineers, but unless they work…

What's the line between censoring and "not showing them as widely as other posts"?

It can be smoothly related with probability of post being undesirable. So if algo thinks it's 50% undesirable simply count it as "half a weight." Or tune this function to be whatever you want. Twitter/etc already makes arbitrary choices about what gets shown.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#65

Post by hi5eyes »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #26
freehunter wrote: post #7

My business does a lot of posting on Facebook of sometimes controversial things (we're a news site and we sometimes cover local politics). By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. I have ~3k followers on one of my pages. Usually ~200-300 people see any given post if it has no engagements. If it has normal engagement, it might get to 1000-2000 views, st…

> By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. Well, duh. If people are fighting they are definitely "engaged", but not in a good way. Defining that more engagement equals more success is what made social networks so toxic. The current state that more eyeballs equals more ad money needs to change.

lmao that’s completely bullshit

my fb page is about 16k and one of my most engaged posts is just people sharing/tagging their friends

the controversial content meme is so played out. you can definitely make and post safe content and still get crazy good engagements

the only reason people blame social networks for toxicity is because _people_ choose to engage with the toxic shit and _people_ choose to post this controversial shit as a cheap way to boost their brand

Yeah, i used to post edgy content that got people arguing in the comments. as a kid. blogging after school. i learned it by adopting baiting style quips from chans. i cant believe grown adults are still this pathetic

>Defining that more engagement equals more success is what made social networks so toxic.

social networks are built to give you want you want. you can choose to stop participating it the toxicity for starters

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#66

Post by freehunter »

hi5eyes wrote: post #65
ASalazarMX wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. Well, duh. If people are fighting they are definitely "engaged", but not in a good way. Defining that more engagement equals more success is what made social networks so toxic. The current state that more eyeballs equals more ad money needs to change.

lmao that’s completely bullshit my fb page is about 16k and one of my most engaged posts is just people sharing/tagging their friends the controversial content meme is so played out. you can definitely make and post safe content and still get crazy good engagements the only reason people blame social networks for toxicity is because _people_ choose to engage with the toxic shit and _people_ choose to post this contro…

>you can choose to stop participating in the toxicity for starters

In my case, it's not that easy. Simply posting factual news updates is often enough to trigger wild responses. For example, a few months ago I attended a city council meeting and wrote a Facebook post during the meeting saying "City has approved a new 70 unit condo project" with a picture of the plans. It was one of the most toxic comment sections I've ever seen simply because some people disagreed with the action being taken. Not my actions, but the actions I was reporting on. The answer certainly is not to stop reporting the news.

On a side note, your comment comes dangerously close to sounding like a personal attack. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong but it seems like you're saying if you have problems on Facebook (which I and the person you're responding to have said we do), we must be pathetic and posting like edgy children seeking the toxicity we find. If that's not your intention, maybe you could clarify?

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#67

Post by vincent-toups »

pmarreck wrote: post #36
freehunter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of locating in Silicon Valley and hiring the smartest programmers in the world if you can't figure out an algorithm to make hateful posts not show up as often in someone's feed? I doubt it's because they can't. The more likely answer is they don't want to.

It's actually a hard problem, similar to porn detection without using humans (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it ). Blocking purely based on keywords or Bayesian filtering usually paints too broad a stroke and ends up limiting well-intended free speech (I once had a comment blocked for arguing AGAINST racism!). It's similar to the "blocking all mention of sex also blocks sex education" problem…

If you limit yourself merely to detecting abusive tweets, perhaps it is hard. But there are plenty of ways to adjust the way the social dynamics work that would decrease this kind of behavior but, I believe the argument goes, most of those would also decrease _engagement_.

The real problem is the incentives, both for Twitter and for people interacting on twitter. The solution is probably _social_ rather than technical, but as long as Twitter wants to keep your eyeballs on their site for as long as possible (so they can sell ads or whatever to advertisers) a whole host of solutions are going to be verboten.

By way of example, Hackernews literally has a feature to just lock you out of the site if you are using it more than you want to. That is great for us, the users. But twitter would never do such a thing.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#68

Post by [deleted] »

wmil wrote: post #17
lilbobbytables wrote: post #6

"Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself" What am I missing here? There was no harassment of any sort. Alternative headlines could have been: "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you gain more followers" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you drive awareness" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you get more twitter followers for your cause or business" "Twitter has an algorithm that expands…

I guess the point is that Twitter could easily tone down pile ons by noticing that a tweet is generating many more replies than likes. Then reduce display of that tweet instead of boosting it to non-followers. Perhaps not for blue checkmarks (they've declared themselves central to the public debate), but for average users Twitter should try to calm down pile ons.

[deleted]

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#69

Post by gdy »

hi5eyes wrote: post #65
ASalazarMX wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. Well, duh. If people are fighting they are definitely "engaged", but not in a good way. Defining that more engagement equals more success is what made social networks so toxic. The current state that more eyeballs equals more ad money needs to change.

lmao that’s completely bullshit my fb page is about 16k and one of my most engaged posts is just people sharing/tagging their friends the controversial content meme is so played out. you can definitely make and post safe content and still get crazy good engagements the only reason people blame social networks for toxicity is because _people_ choose to engage with the toxic shit and _people_ choose to post this contro…

I see that you haven't really abandoned your 'baiting style'.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#70

Post by stubish »

cat199 wrote: post #58
freehunter wrote: post #7

My business does a lot of posting on Facebook of sometimes controversial things (we're a news site and we sometimes cover local politics). By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. I have ~3k followers on one of my pages. Usually ~200-300 people see any given post if it has no engagements. If it has normal engagement, it might get to 1000-2000 views, st…

> That's the problem with these algorithms that humans don't watch over. ... and Facebook/Twitter profit from it and even promote it. Don't be fooled.. Someone is spot checking the training data against the output at a statistically valid sampling interval.. ML in this case is the data equivalent of a limited liability corp..

Why does someone need to spot check the training data against the output? I'd assumed the algorithm is trying to maximize a metric, which is best completely automated without human intervention to slow it down or provide biased opinions. Even fuzzier goals like 'not be racist' would get turned into metrics (eg. proportion of words used that are on this watchlist or similar scoring algorithm)
Post reply on HN