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Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

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Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#111

Post by jeffbee »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #44
jeffbee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ment…

I also do not understand the theory that the order of presentation is necessitated by advertising. Adverts are inserted into the 2nd position regardless of how the feed is ordered.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#112

Post by CharlesW »

dmarcos wrote: post #76
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.

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

"Open up the algorithm" is a fantasy where you point a function at a tweet and it returns a boolean. In reality, content moderation at this scale is a complex problem that requires a sophisticated system of many parallel strategies (some of which are more automatable, some less) and many thousands of people to manage.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#113

Post by CharlesW »

paulsutter wrote: post #96
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.

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

> Do you consider Jack Dorsey naive on the subject?

On the contrary, Jack knows what he's talking about and wants this because it would allow him to abdicate responsibility for Twitter platform moderation.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#114

Post by falcolas »

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 “many eyes” saying is a comfortably common, but untrue, saying. Were it true, heartbleed and its ilk would never have occurred, given how widely used and distributed it was.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#115

Post by systemvoltage »

mdb31 wrote: post #35
systemvoltage wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion is about whether people can see what the algorithms are doing. Read only access to the code so they cannot manipulate people into their belief system or arbitrary shadow-ban rules. You’re right about human judgement but that’s not the topic. The central point, I repeat emphatically, is about transparency, not governance. Twitter can continue exactly the same way but just be transparent. The intense pus…

I'm pretty sure the "algorithm" is "we count the number of end-user flags/reports, and if > X we remove it"? Public knowledge of what "X" is doesn't really help, I think, other than to aid spammers? And a requirement to "talk to a human" upon hitting X would surely immediately degrade into "Google has reviewed your appeal and has determined that the infinite block of your account remains in effect. There is no furthe…

There are a whole host of algorithms. Recomendation, feed, suggested followers, interest-based suggestions, etc. I am suspecting algorithms for how "trending" topics are picked are quite involved. It probably goes through filters, blacklists, whitelists, some AI-voodoo and gets increasingly promoted based on engagement in real-time.

That secret sauce is ripe for manipulation and extremely powerful.

Against combating spam - I mean, isn't this how something gets stronger? HN has a strong view that open source software is more secure because it gets hardened through exposure, not through obfuscation.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#116

Post by CrimsonCape »

alm1 wrote: post #108

I feel like authors are thinking about the "algorithm" almost as if it's just a bunch of if-else statements in a tree. 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 rese…

You are suggesting the people who read HN and might click over to the "open Twitter" codebase won't understand it?

Engineers don't exist in a vacuum, the same engineers who write the algos are here on HN. Show HN the Twitter source code and a lot of engineers will understand it.

What is more likely is that the engineers are currently bound by NDAs and can't say what influences the algo.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#117

Post by alvaroir »

If the problem is that the "recommendations" are biased, wouldn't it be simpler to:

1) Remove the recommendation part. Go back to a simpler version of Twitter. 2) Still give the option for a recommendation system but, somehow, open the code, maybe some version of the data and publish documentation (like papers or something) detailing the training process of the current running version.

than build a recommender system marketplace? Also, in what sense would this be different from allowing third party Twitter clients + opening a ritcher API?

The ultimate idea of using ML is to "automatically" build the recommender system the user likes (measuring this with some particular metric like online time or retention) the most and also automatically adapt it as his/her preferences change. The problem to me is more the metrics chosen to be optimized.

However, I believe that in the end, and in order to be profitable, user retention and time on the platform will still be pursued. It doesn't seem like an easy fix to me.

Regarding the "free speech" part, I'm not an expert, but I'd say (and after having watched the TED interview) that countries' legislations will considerably constraint this.

I love the idea of a true free platform tho

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#118

Post by gopher_space »

gfodor wrote: post #91
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would provide insight but if the goal is to increase transparency to the point of meaningfully improving trust in the centralized actor that is Twitter, I don’t see it moving that needle much. Given the right data you can kind of coax a lot of these algorithms into arbitrary outputs, so if you’re starting from a place of distrust then if you can’t replicate the outputs yourself you wont have evidence to alter prio…

The point I'm stuck on in this whole conversation is why you'd continue to use Twitter if you felt they were untrustworthy. Why are we discussing freedom of speech when you can just load another app and get all the freedom you want?

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#119

Post by baggy_trough »

jmull wrote: post #106
baggy_trough wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose you can ditch twitter and switch to reddit.

I don't understand what that has to do with my comment.

Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

#120

Post by baggy_trough »

jeffbee wrote: post #111
NineStarPoint wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ment…

I also do not understand the theory that the order of presentation is necessitated by advertising. Adverts are inserted into the 2nd position regardless of how the feed is ordered.

It's more like the social network can use the algorithm to surface clickbait or whatever drives their metrics.
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