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twitter/the-algorithm

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Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#141

Post by UncleMeat »

nthot wrote: post #113
ProAm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or is it six cats in a basement with a laser pointer and a mouse? The point of releasing it is to let people know exactly why they see the tweets they do in the order they do. I hope Elon just goes back to time base ordering of tweets.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to twitter, so I may be misunderstanding something. On my Twitter Home Screen there are three little stars on the upper right of the central container which allow you to toggle between "top tweets" (ie. 'The Algorithm') and "latest tweets" which is the time based ordering.

What you are misunderstanding is that there is more social clout to be gained by complaining about twitter than exploring the available features. The ability to sort by latest doesn't stop people from feeling self righteous by demanding this feature exist.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#144

Post by [deleted] »

axg11 wrote: post #95

I've worked on very large scale recommendation systems at a FAANG. If Twitter's system resembles anything like ours, the concept of publishing or open sourcing "the algorithm" doesn't make sense. Even if we were to open source all associated code and publish all related documents it would be very difficult to make sense of the entire system. That is precisely why companies such as Twitter A/B test the hell out of eve…

[deleted]

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#146

Post by 34679 »

axg11 wrote: post #95

I've worked on very large scale recommendation systems at a FAANG. If Twitter's system resembles anything like ours, the concept of publishing or open sourcing "the algorithm" doesn't make sense. Even if we were to open source all associated code and publish all related documents it would be very difficult to make sense of the entire system. That is precisely why companies such as Twitter A/B test the hell out of eve…

I don't believe the point was ever to convey an complete understanding of the system, but to allow for the identification of "red flags": Specific functions that would be deemed controversial or counter to equal opportunity speech.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#147

Post by jonas21 »

shrimpx wrote: post #82

I don't understand the concept of open-sourcing "the algorithm". First of all, "the algorithm" is probably hundreds of thousands of lines of code, including all the tedious boilerplate like cache policies and multi-AZ logic. And second of all, doesn't the algorithm include machine learning components, which are trained on terabytes of data? That data will likely be impossible to open source. And open sourcing the neu…

This is pretty standard in the machine learning world. You'll open-source the code and weights trained on a public data set (these are often licensed specifically for non-commercial use). But in production, you'll be using different weights trained on a proprietary data set.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#148

Post by UncleMeat »

memish wrote: post #57
mostlysimilar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter Locks Down Product Changes After Agreeing to Musk Bid - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-locks-down-product-ch...

> Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from “going rogue,” according to one of the people. What could a rogue employee do?

Insider risk is hard as heck.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#149

Post by vasco »

marcinzm wrote: post #107
abduhl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, irrelevant, and the code somewhere is readable. Take an example like gravity: is there an algorithm for how gravity acts even though it varies per each molecule based on a kajillion other molecules? Of course there is.

If I have your DNA can I recreate a perfect copy of you as you are now including your mind? It is after all the code you were made with.

The point is not to recreate it or explain it, or to have a way to say "tweet X will get rank Y" but to open source what there is. It doesn't matter if no single person can explain it, it'll still be open source and readable and the types of inputs will be known. But this doesn't look like a discussion on open source and more about politics at this point.

I for one haven't worked at FAANG and think it'll be super interesting to read this code, I can't believe software engineers are complaining about a potentially super complex bleeding edge codebase for timeline recommendations / ranking being open sourced. This is going to be great reading material if it ever gets published!

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#150

Post by mhh__ »

tyingq wrote: post #140
mhh__ wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it doesn't make sense. I think it's just a dog whistle to the people who believe google have a guy in a room somewhere turning the "conservative search results" lever down a notch during elections.

Not saying Google is turning down conservative search results, but they absolutely can. Using the same cycle of human raters and tweaking weights they used to push down comparison shopping sites. See http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

It's the man in a room part I was emphasising. It's simultaneously massively incorrect about how software actually works, misunderstands social dynamics inside companies, and massively stokes the fire when it comes to conspiracy theories along these lines (in this case at least)
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