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Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

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Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#111

Context: I teach at Princeton and study social media and recommendation systems. From a very quick skim of the repositories, this appears to be quite limited transparency. The documentation gives a decent high-level overview of how Tweet recommendation works—no surprises—and the code tracks that roadmap. Those are meaningful positive steps. But the underlying policies and models are almost entirely missing (there are…

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Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#112

Context: I teach at Princeton and study social media and recommendation systems. From a very quick skim of the repositories, this appears to be quite limited transparency. The documentation gives a decent high-level overview of how Tweet recommendation works—no surprises—and the code tracks that roadmap. Those are meaningful positive steps. But the underlying policies and models are almost entirely missing (there are…

So why did they opensource it?

So they could pretend to be open. It's the "Open"AI model. Open-washing?

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#114

Context: I teach at Princeton and study social media and recommendation systems. From a very quick skim of the repositories, this appears to be quite limited transparency. The documentation gives a decent high-level overview of how Tweet recommendation works—no surprises—and the code tracks that roadmap. Those are meaningful positive steps. But the underlying policies and models are almost entirely missing (there are…

So why did they opensource it?

PR

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#115

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...

  \*
  \* 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...

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#116

Typically, we expect to be able to run "open source" software ourselves. If you open-source your C compiler, I can compile a C program with it. In a few recent high-profile cases though, companies have "open sourced" ML systems without releasing the model weights. This practice is just like your releasing the builds scripts for your C compiler, but not the compiler itself. While more transparency from social media wi…

Running this code would require a lot more than just the exported models. There are a large number of code and system dependencies missing.

Of course --- but without the model parameters, even stubbing those systems would be useless. My point is that while this release gives the public some information about how Twitter ranks tweets, it doesn't tell the story because huge pieces of "the algorithm" are missing. For example: the NSFW classifier "open source" release doesn't tell us anything about what Twitter considers NSFW and what it doesn't.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#120
Given the complex relationship between advertisers, platform, and users I don't know if any meaningful contribution can be made to the algorithm without pissing anyone off. The following tab already gave people who're not interested in algo recommendations a way out. I don't quite understand the reasoning behind open sourcing the algorithm. Any thoughts?
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