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Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?
X is once again full of bots selling crypto and financial services .
X is once again full of bots selling crypto and financial services .
It's really degenerated into a trash heap. I quit years ago.
It’s hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a “public utility” without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the company as vulnerable to these issues. That’s why Masnick’s article “Protocols not Platforms” is still so spot-on. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works? The article only shows one plot of one specific instance, and there could be more than one explanation for the sudden drop in viewership (especially given the involvement of Twitter's owner).
Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works? The article only shows one plot of one specific instance, and there could be more than one explanation for the sudden drop in viewership (especially given the involvement of Twitter's owner).
It’s not a very sophisticated algorithm, likely because the best people aren’t super keen on working there for WLB reasons.
It’s hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a “public utility” without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the company as vulnerable to these issues. That’s why Masnick’s article “Protocols not Platforms” is still so spot-on. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
Pretty sure people calling it a public utility was always an aspirational claim and not an earnest belief that it had a governance structure that made it immune to such an attack…
Many of the communication outlets through this utility have as well their own web infrastructure, hopefully serving as a single source of truth, whether that looks like wsj.com or whitehouse.gov. Interestingly enough the W3C has a recommendation to publish activities through an interoperable manner. There's even talk of putting the Bluesky protocol through whatever process the IETF uses to create a request for comments.
Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?
BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.
I think this is barking up the right tree with the wrong lesson - these things are the same. Elon Musk, for worse mostly, is a social influencer. You can tell because a lot of people follow him. I am sure the algorithm in unreasonably kind to him (as he can write it) but it's also true that a lot of people care what he does and what he does changes what people care about.
The real question here, to me, is: does this kind of mass social calculus make any kind of real sense? Can we actually extend the idea of interest to 219,000,000 people or do we leave the coordinate system at some point? I suspect it doesn't hold up.
I am a long time believer in the need for good algorithmic filtering. There is more happening in the world than I have attention for and I want a machine to help me. Most solutions are quite bad because they are focused on how much money they can make instead of how much they can help. But I think it's a real problem and the bad, money-grubbing algorithms that surround us now are making our lives much worse.
Ultimately I think this comes back to operationalizing human relationships. What does it math for Musk to have that many followers? This is distasteful but real, I fear, in the age we live. Social influence is clearly real and we are measuring it in flawed ways and we should try and improve those flawed measurements.