121–130 of 138 posts
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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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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.
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 e…
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It's more like the social network can use the algorithm to surface clickbait or whatever drives their metrics.
You're discussing some hypothetical. Actual Twitter just sells the 2nd position in the feed for targeted adverts. That's it. Nothing fancy.
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.
Further, compromise of one box typically does not render all of them running that OS useless and harmful.
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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?
A social network complaining about hyperbolism and outrageous claims being made on it's platform is like complaining people are breathing too much air.
Twitter is not a place grownups should be participating.
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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.
The fact that we calculate precisely what users see on their devices on servers is a result of the architectural constraints of the time, and more importantly, the ad model of monetizing social networks.
If social networks were not monetized in this way, there would be far more power allocated to clients and APIs.
This isn't to say user devices can do everything: they can't. But can easily be given significant power to filter, reorder, and request different content — and with more advanced engineering, allow users to parameterize feeds.
The reason we can't have this is that allowing this degree of user choice undermines the ads model.
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I don’t think so - because releasing the data is a massive hill comparatively due to the immense privacy and legal issues.
Hmm Twitter already sells its "firehose" to the highest bidder.
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Hmm Twitter already sells its "firehose" to the highest bidder.
I’m sure twitters algorithms take advantage of all interaction data, like impressions, scrolls, and clicks. Agree tho it’s good a lot of the data is public.