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Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

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Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#81

Post by extheat »

soheil wrote: post #60
CharlesW wrote: post #39

"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.

For a long period of time, Reddit used to be open source. It can be done, plus additional changes to add transparency on top, like giving people the option to switch between different recommendation algorithms, making it clear why content was recommended, and so forth.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#83

Post by bko »

CharlesW wrote: post #39

"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.

I think that's a way to call for transparency. For instance, if they say they don't shadow ban people, then it should be evident in the code. And it would force them to have a clear process for things like search without any "nudging" or social manipulation.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#84

Post by mulmen »

jeffbee wrote: post #64
baggy_trough wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I choose people to follow. If somebody is flooding my feed more than I like, then I unfollow them. Truly do not understand why anyone would want it to work differently other than marketers.

But it's not spam. If fifty people you follow retweet the same popular post, you do not want to see it fifty-one times. You want to see it once, and you want it ranked highly because everyone you follow thinks it's an important post. It's a form of crowdsourcing from a curated group of contributors. The chonological view cannot accommodate.

That’s more of a problem with Twitter’s design. I don’t want to see any “retweets”. If someone I care about replies to something then (optionally!) show me their reply. If I find that compelling I can follow the primary source. I do not care about regurgitated content.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#85

Post by hooande »

capableweb wrote: post #9
memish wrote: post #5

A marketplace of algorithms and "pick your own algorithm" would be interesting. Is there any reason not to do this? Not sure why this is getting downvoted. It's not crazy. Even Jack is pushing for it: "The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone" https://twitter.com/jack/status/1507146276416098307

Hard to monetize when people can chose algorithms that doesn't prefer content that makes them stay at the platform longer, angry or happy. Public companies are all about making money.

who would choose to see unengaging content? "My algorithm is set to show bland agreement with last week's news"

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#86

Post by gfodor »

sobkas wrote: post #63
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.

> 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. And also other way around, data depends on algorithms and tools that created them. You can't have insightful understanding of data without knowing how and why they were created.

True - however the thrust of the arguments for opening Twitter seem to be focused on opening up the code - so the “code without data” scenario is the one worth honing in on.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#87

Post by gfodor »

soheil wrote: post #51
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.

I think that's what everyone is talking about. They're just using the term algorithm colloquially.

I don’t think so - because releasing the data is a massive hill comparatively due to the immense privacy and legal issues.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#88

Post by extheat »

eric4smith wrote: post #79

Amazingly 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…

> 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.

I think the solution to this is to let people switch between different recommendation algorithms, a stream of chronological tweets, most liked among recent posted, one powered by ML, etc. I don't see any reason the implementations behind this, or even Twitter more broadly, could not be open source. There are many other open source projects, like Signal that manage this just fine. And for a while, even Reddit used to be open source. It's definitely do-able.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#89

Post by bko »

eric4smith wrote: post #79

Amazingly 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…

I think they're looking for a statement like:

if (tweet.from in bad_users): score *= 0.8

Do they have the levers in place to manipulate results or is it a clear objective scoring system that shows what you see on your feed and search results? I believe they have something like this. To what extent its being manipulated is a separate question.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#90

Post by 310260 »

The author's suggestion of a marketplace for algorithms sounds really cool. Whether it's easily technically feasible is another question entirely but the idea of that level of customization would be really cool. Some of the functionality is already there with Lists (as far as allowing regular users to create feeds and others being allowed to subscribe to them).

I do worry about the political implications of it though. People choosing to subscribe to only their world view would create an impenetrable echo chamber. At least now, there is some crossover. If people chose algorithms that avoided the other side of a debate, it would make things worse. Furthermore, you could have outside influences tricking people into certain algorithms to secure a populace with their beliefs.

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