101–110 of 138 posts
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.
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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…
You assert that more eyes on the flaws would make the issue worse rather than better, but i disagree.
However, open sourcing any and all manual interventions over the algorithm + the guidelines used for evaluation and/or labeling (if any is done), would help to build a little bit of trust.
Not that much though, but it would be a start.
"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.
Do you consider Jack Dorsey naive on the subject? "The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone" - Jack Dorsey https://twitter.com/jack/status/1507146276416098307
if(tweet.author.affiliation == "democrat"){ promoteTweet(tweet); } else { shadowBan(tweet.author); }
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How/where does discovery happen?
As a pull, not a push. Meaning, in the very beginning, from off the chronological feed. Later, from following conversations of follows to new interesting accounts.
"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.
Do you consider Jack Dorsey naive on the subject? "The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone" - Jack Dorsey https://twitter.com/jack/status/1507146276416098307
Read only audit is an overly naive way to think about understanding complex algorithms. In an audit they would find an enable of large DNN transformer models with thousands of layers and thousands of features often with their own transformation trees. There are entire CS departments dedicated to researching tools to understand complex nonlinear models. You definitely can't do with a read only code audit. You can _barely_ do it with full access to the model, full access to the input data and being able to retrain and rerun the model on that data.
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?
I don’t want them arbitrarily hidden from my timeline by an algorithm. Twitter offers a chronological timeline but has repeatedly reset my user preference for it. If there weren’t third party applications that respected my preference I definitely would not be using it anymore.
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.
This approach only works if auditability is mandated to also be a property of the model, which typically reduces model complexity and accuracy too. We do this with credit scoring models semi-successfully.