Live data from Hacker News

Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

blog.twitter.com

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a screenshot in case this changes later: https://i.imgur.com/F8GSeyH.png And, no, this wasn't in a merge-request, it was in the "main" branch of HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala.

What's all the "DDG"? Is this data from DuckDuckGo?

DuckDuckGoose is the twitter A/B test framework

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#362

"Today, the For You timeline consists of 50% In-Network Tweets and 50% Out-of-Network Tweets on average, though this may vary from user to user." I have spent significant effort creating a network and there you go choosing to ignore my efforts by putting in 50% of crap-I-don't-want-to-see. That is why I despise your algorithm.

I'm confused, then why not just use your 'followed' feed instead of 'for you'?

On the android app at least, a recent update made it so pressing the home button while you're in the "followed" tab switches to the "for you" tab. It's extremely annoying

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers who work at twitter can easily find another job in the US.

Can they? I don't know, but I imagine that at this point, everyone still working for Twitter is there because they don't have any other realistic option.

Most people working there are looking for other jobs. It is not hard to find another job, but in this market it is hard to find one that pays the same. A lot of people have 4 year stock grants and annual refreshers, pushing their compensation very high which can only be matched at other tech companies, which currently are not hiring much.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#364
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We should really all just bow in awe as we are clearly inferior.

Princeton has a Code Reading 101 that all postdocs/professors must take, however in exchange for the Secrets of Speed Reading you must acknowledge every message with where you learnt those skills.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#366

I wonder what the "author_is_elon", "author_is_power_user", "author_is_democrat", and "author_is_republican" labels are for [1]. [1]: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/home-mixe...

I would not be surprised if “author_is_elon” was added after he bought the company and worked the engineers too hard to figure out why his tweets don’t have a lot of engagement.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#367
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LeBron doesn’t get $84 of value from Twitter? Definitely not a political statement going on there.

Parent didn’t say it’s not “political”. It’s reasonable for a wealthy person to feel that a system that discriminates against the poor is not a system they want to participate in. (Note that I use discriminate in the literal sense, as a simple statement of fact.)

But the example you give is an appeal to a universal moral good. Not partisan politics. So despite saying it’s not not political, your justification is that it’s not political.

Also, how did you get a blue check before being able to buy one?

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still smells to high heaven to me. Not the Elon part, I don't really care about that. But collecting metrics about "republican" vs "democrat" sounds like a particularly bad set of priorities at work.

Anyone that has worked in social network recommendations ( raises hand ) knows that they'll be accused of being politically biased, particularly if the recommendations aren't explicitly promoting biased news sites on the Right. (e.g. The Associated Press[0] is leftist propaganda! Where's unbiased news like Gateway Pundit[1] or InfoWars[5]?!) So data scientists and engineers will get pulled in to investigate the lates…

Well, there was this:

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://twitter.com/_johnforte/status/1641900138305134594 > Twitter is also using the page rank algo that google created. Basically, if a lot of people interact with the user they create more authority in the system.

https://twitter.com/federicolois/status/1641900547555901441 > Interesting piece here. If you are following less than 500 and you are verified your reputation is 100.

https://twitter.com/carlcarrie/status/1641900542573133826

    > The Twitter Algo uses graph of followers and tweet similarity to identify what alignment you are politically

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

\* \* These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are \* serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users. \* This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes \* that negatively impacts one group over others. \* From: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...

Still smells to high heaven to me. Not the Elon part, I don't really care about that. But collecting metrics about "republican" vs "democrat" sounds like a particularly bad set of priorities at work.

I suspect it plays into this stuff: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

They wanted to answer the questions of "is twitter biased against Republicans" so they measured it, turns out they favored republicans.

Post reply on HN