Live data from Hacker News

Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

blog.twitter.com

161–170 of 504 posts

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#161
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't Twitter (or similarly large companies) have open-sourced their a/b testing suite? It's not like the math there is proprietary. I mean, I'm sure the parameters to the math are proprietary. But the basic math seems simple enough.

If you're not using an off the shelf one, chances are it's tightly integrated to your application framework. Trying to tease out the pieces that aren't coupled to Twitter's User class is probably more effort than it's worth

That makes sense. Thanks.

I guess the comment I read implied Twitter had an amazing A/B test suite, as opposed to a tightly specialized A/B test suite.

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like A/B tests approach anything like the rigor that we expect from actual science, though.

If "actual science" is a real thing, then absolutely nothing humanity has ever done in the name of scientific endeavour is "actual science," given every experiment exists on a continuum of trade-offs. A case could be made that A/B testing is insufficiently rigorous given specific goals, resources, limitations, context, etc. But that case isn't being made here.

Some pure mathematics is actually rigorous.

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "actual science" is a real thing, then absolutely nothing humanity has ever done in the name of scientific endeavour is "actual science," given every experiment exists on a continuum of trade-offs. A case could be made that A/B testing is insufficiently rigorous given specific goals, resources, limitations, context, etc. But that case isn't being made here.

Some pure mathematics is actually rigorous.

Hah! You're fast. I was about to comment on that: "actual math" probably exists. "actual science" probably doesn't. I'm not sure any experiment can ever be free from error, uncertainty, trade-offs. (And now I'm super curious about this...)

Thanks though. I've narrowed my original comment to more accurately represent the scope I am referring to.

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you demonstrate them as such? And can you validate your demonstration by eliminating the content produced by bots and sock puppets?

I see comments like this frequently on hackernews and i'm curious on your motivation. Do you actually use twitter so this comment isn't lining up with your expectations? Do you not use twitter and expect this person to justify their experience by doing further research? What is _actually_ motivating you to comment like this?

I personally do, and nothing has changed for me since he took over. I would like to see some semblance of a proof when someone tries to be as bold as to claim something is demonstrably false, he's not talking about having a different experience he is saying as a matter of fact that it is a false statement.

For all the jokes about excessive sourcing that hacker news gets it's probably one of the things that keeps it from turning into yet another hearsay platform.

This is genuinely the only place in the internet right now I can actually read and have a decent discussion about musk without it either turning into a hate circlejerk or a flamewar, would be nice to keep it that way.

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#165
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers and marketers use the equations but measure contemporary trends. Science is more “what’s true if humans didn’t exist.” Marketing is more “what widget generates more revenue?”

This isn’t true. Science is ultimately the scientific method — make a hypothesis, test a change, observe the results, repeat. It’s an algorithm for learning and broadly gaining information about reality. It can equally be applied to things having to do with humans and things not having to do with humans.

Not gp, but there's a significant kink when this applies to humans; namely, that humans have the ability to reflect on publicly known outcomes, and change their behavior en-masse in light of information so gained.

I put this earler in the phrase "reflection completeness": https://sdrinf.com/reflection-completeness ie there are things which stops working when people know about it.

In particular with A/B testing, this means that the initial A/B test is intermingled from at least 3 effects: specifically it measures how the naive population's behavior changes as a function of new functionality being made available. This is heavily, heavily time-dependent; specifically there's a "novelty effect" (early data collection will not be representative to long-term usage patterns); and there's "reflection effect" (once the outcome of the test is widely known, people can change their behavior based on that). Controlling for the first is difficult, but possible; controlling for the second, beyond just "keeping everything secret", is significantly more so, as the timelines for that might be years in length.

I strongly suspect GP was pointing at this timeline factor, and specifically that market engineering, as currently, generally, widely practiced, is grounded on the immediately available signal of "does it increases sales in 2 weeks of A/B test running". Which, given novelty effects, is heavily biased towards "yes"; and these people aren't incentivized (nor have the time/energy) to measure _very_ long-term effects beyond novelty, and reflection period.

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#166

> Our Trust & Safety team... remains strong and well-resourced... > ...impressions on violative content are down over the past month... I think both of those claims are demonstrably false.

I think the last one might be "true-able" if they changed the internal classification for certain types of content.

Third-parties haven't confirmed this, and their data shows the opposite, so I'd wager either it's an outright lie or a function of classification.

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is pretty clearly unbanning violent right-wing extremists while banning rule-following accounts on the left, sometimes transparently at the direction of the right wingers. Why do you insist on pretending anything else?

Same game as always, but now the other team now has the ball. With a propaganda weapon as powerful as Twitter, it's probably better for everybody if it's destroyed, rather than continues to be used/abused to escalate political divisions by either side of the great divide. And that seems to be the way things are going. It should never have been taken so seriously to begin with.

By what metric was Twitter previously controlled by the "other team", by which you presumably the far left? Before Elon owned them, they were bending over backwards to allow right wing accounts ([0] for example), and they frequently banned left wing accounts that at all went afoul of the rules

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-algorithm-crackdown-...

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see comments like this frequently on hackernews and i'm curious on your motivation. Do you actually use twitter so this comment isn't lining up with your expectations? Do you not use twitter and expect this person to justify their experience by doing further research? What is _actually_ motivating you to comment like this?

In order presented: Yes. No. You mean, it is not obvious? I am motivated by curiosity. A claim was made that is not supported. It isn't unreasonable to request such a claim to be validated by demonstration. Personally, I have not seen an increase in "hate" or violence or bigotry or any other -ism or -ist. I've seen people disagree in a much more whole-hearted way, while at the same time, seeing prompts for reducing t…

I guess it feels like this is just banter amongst bored people at work and demand for works cited comes off as sealioning or just maybe misreading the room

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about marketing, the A/B testing they do, not science.

what is not scientific about it? maybe its not good science, but it is science. really almost anything is science... Science is just observation and experimentation. Science doesn't dictate how you do the above. Now, someone would find it impossible to reproduce your findings, but - that would just suggest bad science

Incorrect conclusions are frequently drawn from A/B tests. To some, this makes it unscientific, to others, it just means it's bad science. I think the argument is more semantic than objective.

For example, if your metric is "time spent interacting on the platform", then a testing of a rollout of a feature ends up with longer page load times, so users spend more time there because they're waiting for pages to load would increase that metric, and management decides it's a good idea.

Re: Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation

#170
post #155
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... Also, the unbanning of users previously considered hateful also directly conflicts with "to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct"

No, because the thing that has changed explicitly is Twitter is no longer going to ban users based on hateful conduct, but deboost their tweets.

Except they actually keep suspending accounts for violations of the hateful content policy, specifically for Tweets with fairly mild criticism of Musk and nothing that even superficially relates to what is prohibited by the hateful content policy.
Post reply on HN