if(tweet.author.affiliation == "democrat"){ promoteTweet(tweet); } else { shadowBan(tweet.author); }
Yes, this is what people legitimately think the recommendation system is like. It’s insane
Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
71–80 of 138 posts
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#72Oh 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 of Trump. He figured out how to use social media to his advantage.
Before for that, other “movements” that had bridged the gap between real and online worlds were celebrated.
Arab Spring circa 2012, is a particular good example.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#73Sounds 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.
This is a terrible comparison. With OSS people are looking for security flaws. With a twitter/google algorithm people are trying to exploit the system when it works as intended. If there is a secret formula for a successful tweet, people will find it and repeat that behavior ad nauseum.
The problem with google search isn't that people are exploiting 0-days that the developers aren't aware of. The problem is that the majority of the internet is becoming nearly identical pages that do the bare minimum to get ranked by search engines. Making the algorithm public will only exacerbate that
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#74"Open up the algorithm" is such a charmingly naive take on community moderation at scale that I can almost forgive the author for literally parroting Musk as the source of a lightweight take synthesized mostly from other people's thoughts in order to attract attention to his "Every" newsletter platform.
How do you know? Where did you come up with evidence to confirm that statement? There has never been a platform as large as Twitter that opened up its algorithm.
As an example, the bits of Google's original algorithms that they did talk about (pagerank using reputation of in-links to propagate to a page) publicly began getting gamed into irrelevance fairly early on (link-for-link schemes being the start of the SEO industry). After that it's been a continuing struggle of a whole industry looking for weaknesses and Google adapting.
Another way of thinking about it, is that if someone could see what features were most important for the ranking on some site, then they could start to optimize for those, breaking the usefulness of that feature. One obvious example of this is "Please remember to like, comment, and subscribe" on YouTube.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#75The twitter algo shouldn't be complicated. For the most part twitter shows me posts and likes from people I follow, occasionally sprinkling in a topic I follow, like viral tweets.
I want to read stuff from people I follow in more or less chronological order. Sure if something has a 1k likes and was posted a few hours ago and I hadn't seen it, show me that. There are simple formulas for time based rank that are out there.
But I regularly see twitter suppressing posts from people I follow. I won't see someone tweet for a few weeks and I check their account and I see they've been tweeting this whole time. It's wrong and annoying to me as a user.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#76"Open up the algorithm" is such a charmingly naive take on community moderation at scale that I can almost forgive the author for literally parroting Musk as the source of a lightweight take synthesized mostly from other people's thoughts in order to attract attention to his "Every" newsletter platform.
What makes in your opinion the request naive? Too complex to open source or for people to analyze and criticize? I see some people becoming Twitter algorithm experts as we also have Linux kernel developers
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#77Recommender 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.
Right. It’s a bit worrisome that people (even people in this very thread) know nothing about how recommendation and ranking work but think they know everything. “Release the code” is nonsensical.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#78What would be much more interesting would be Twitter allowing users to define and publish their own algorithm, like lists with superpowers.
Stumbled on this idea on https://twitter.com/nbashaw/status/1515054551371378688
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#79Amazingly Naive.
Just the data and code needed to make the “algo” scale to what it is means there is no good way to “open it up”.
But let’s say, and why not, that it actually was opened.
I can see it now, everyone and their mother would be recommending changes to it. People would want it at the extremes, or tweaked to just not recommend their pet peeves.
And if they did not get their way, they would go off in a huff and threaten to join another service.
Years ago I ran a big enough service that had millions and millions of users every month. A member of the military came on and demanded we allow him to do something that was against TOS.
He complained that this was what he fought in Iraq for. So he could write anything he wanted anywhere.
America is certainly not free and it’s time we stop giving our content to services like Twitter and Facebook if we believe that.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#80Do people really browse those recommendations? Twitter is for following a couple of people, switching to timeline mode, and done.