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Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

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Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#41

Post by soheil »

mdb31 wrote: post #3

Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions. Don't like that? Start your own platform, and see how that turns out. Related: yes, I do support interoperability requirements between platforms. No, that still doesn't mean you get to blast your opinion all over the internet without hitting a roadbump every now and then.

> Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions

Where did this sentiment originate from? I never heard of it before and all of a sudden in the last few years I hear so many people parroting it. Why is it that all these people were silent for so long and now they're yelling in unison about how bad Twitter as a megaphone is?

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#42

Post by ItsMonkk »

andrew_ wrote: post #2

Make moderation guidelines and moderation audit trails public and open.

Both filtration(moderation) and sortation(the algorithm) should be handled exactly as Adblock handles it. People can create any list that they want, and people can choose to either subscribe to those lists or not, and can at anytime decide to see what it would look like if they were not.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#43

Post by airstrike »

LightHugger wrote: post #37
jimmaswell wrote: post #26

Sounds like a bad idea. Bad actors would immediately exploit it and figure out how to most effectively flood everyone with spam, same as if Google's exact algorithms were public. Not everything has to be open.

On occasion, people make the same argument about all open source software, that making it public makes it insecure. Fortunately this has not turned out to be the case in reality. If there are flaws in the system they will probably be easier to find and fix with more eyes on it.

The consumption of FOSS and the consumption of tweets are so different I don't really see the merit in comparing the two.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#44

Post by NineStarPoint »

jeffbee wrote: post #21
baggy_trough wrote: post #18

The best feed is the chronological, non-algorithmic feed.

Truly do not understand this point of view. The strictly chronological presentation is too easy to flood with unwanted posts.

You could unfollow the people who spam you with unwanted posts. I find strictly chronological feeds to increase the control I have over what I see by not prioritizing the more popular posts of those I follow. It also makes it much easier to say “I’ve caught up to where I was last time, good time to stop scrolling”. (Parts of a website that center around discovering new content do need curation for the reason you mentioned, but content discovery is to me not the primary purpose of twitter style sites)

Chronological presentation is less useful for serving advertisements though, so I don’t expect it to show up very often.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#45

Post by Juliate »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #40
gfodor wrote: post #28

Recommender systems like Twitter are as much about data as they are about code. Without the dataset and the derived statistics and models that are used for ranking and recall, the code is not going to help much with transparency.

This is a ridiculous claim. While you won’t be able to make use of the code, it would still provide insight of the inputs in relative terms, and evidence methods that do not apply.

> and provide insight as to some things that are not being done.

That's not an algorithm, that's product strategy & management.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#46

Post by 11111 »

gfodor wrote: post #28

Recommender systems like Twitter are as much about data as they are about code. Without the dataset and the derived statistics and models that are used for ranking and recall, the code is not going to help much with transparency.

At least according to this Twitter both agrees with you and is in the process of exploring transparency for both.

https://blog.openmined.org/announcing-our-partnership-with-t...

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#47

Post by soheil »

dkobia wrote: post #14

The most contentious moderation happens via subjective human intervention rather than an algorithms. Fully machine driven moderation is a black hole into which copious amounts of time and money from the r&d labs of the biggest social media companies disappear into every year for a long time now.

> The most contentious moderation happens via subjective human intervention rather than an algorithms.

1. Source?

2. Thought experiment: if said subjective human intervention was recorded and codified into an algorithm it wouldn't be as contentious?

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#48

Post by evandale »

mdb31 wrote: post #3

Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions. Don't like that? Start your own platform, and see how that turns out. Related: yes, I do support interoperability requirements between platforms. No, that still doesn't mean you get to blast your opinion all over the internet without hitting a roadbump every now and then.

> Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions

It will be so satisfying for Musk to buy Twitter, open it up completely, and then be able to use this argument in reverse.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#49

Post by admax88qqq »

soheil wrote: post #41
mdb31 wrote: post #3

Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions. Don't like that? Start your own platform, and see how that turns out. Related: yes, I do support interoperability requirements between platforms. No, that still doesn't mean you get to blast your opinion all over the internet without hitting a roadbump every now and then.

> Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions Where did this sentiment originate from? I never heard of it before and all of a sudden in the last few years I hear so many people parroting it. Why is it that all these people were silent for so long and now they're yelling in unison about how bad Twitter as a megaphone is?

Because fundamentally when people complain about being censored on places like twitter or TikTok, they're really complaining about not being broadcast loudly enough.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#50

Post by matheweis »

jimmaswell wrote: post #26

Sounds like a bad idea. Bad actors would immediately exploit it and figure out how to most effectively flood everyone with spam, same as if Google's exact algorithms were public. Not everything has to be open.

Not if, as the article suggested, there were multiple algorithms to choose from.

Especially not if the top choices were fundamentally different from each other.

It may go so far as to make it significantly more difficult for bad actors to operate.

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