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Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

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181–190 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#181

"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'?

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#182
post #151

Is it even what they use in production? There is code that favor Elon's tweets so I'd yes that's probably what they use

> There is code that favor Elon's tweets so I'd yes that's probably what they use Where?

Spoiler - there isn’t.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#183

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...

So now engineers working on the algo can ensure their launches won't lower Elon's tweet visibility. Looks like those remaining at Twitter have a knack for corporate survival.

When your visa is on the line, you’ll do anything

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#184

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...

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.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#185

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…

> But the underlying policies and models are almost entirely missing (there are a couple valuable components in [1]). Without those, we can't evaluate the behavior and possible effects of "the algorithm."

Haven't gone through yet, but yeah, if that's the case, all this is, is a glorified framework to plug your own in.. Not exactly what was promised.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#186

Great pull request here which improves the algorithm: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/pull/17

[flagged]

The trouble with spammy jokes like this is it discourages companies from bothering with open-source in the future. I know I'd be less likely to champion an initiative like this if I thought it might blow up in my face.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#187
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be great (unweighting bluechecks) but they actually plan to go in the other direction: Starting April 15th non-bluechecks won't show up in the "For you" section (the algorithm timeline) at all. Unpaid users are being written completely out of the algo. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1640502698549075972

I believe LeBron James said recently he isn't going to waste his money on a blue checkmark, so it should be interesting to see what stays and what goes.

Depends on how they weight the is_user_china_mouthpiece variable

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#188
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know there's a joke about this regarding his ego and there's certainly some truth in that, however it's also quite believable that after a deployment he might have noticed the popularity of his tweets going down (since he no doubt checks his reach), so I can kind of understand how he might see "republicans", "democrats" and "celebrities_it_makes_sense_to_check_this_with_my_account_as_i_am_a_very_active_user" as cor…

We don't need to speculate on this. It sounds like he did actually fire engineers over his tweets getting less engagement than he wanted. https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-...

Honestly, if you read behind the lines, it sounds like the employee was intentionally making a joke about it at his expense in front of a bunch of people, and I think a lot of CEOs would take that badly as this is effectively the same thing as calling your boss egocentric.

But, we do have a bit of code that measures metrics on his account, so can we find the bit of code that increases the engagement on his account?

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a very cynical take. They should be commended for publishing recommendation code at all, which no other major social network does.

This is like FB open sourcing the compiled frontend code you can see yourself using inspect.

If we commend them for this we're helping promote and encourage this faux open source virtue signaling

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