The best feed is the chronological, non-algorithmic feed.
Truly do not understand this point of view. The strictly chronological presentation is too easy to flood with unwanted posts.
Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason to keep the general public from running arbitrary database queries? Yes, I think there is. For example, regular expressions are turing-complete so you can make a query arbitrarily slow without a single join. edit: complexity lol
> are NP-complete You mean Turing-complete?
I meant what I said, but I was wrong, thanks.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
When criticizing X, you cannot in good faith say — why don’t you build Y that’s like X? It just implicitly admits that criticizing X is off limits and you don’t like it.
Except that's not what's happening here. When doing anything on the internet "how are you going to control spam and obvious trolls" is question #1. Twitter has an answer to that: we mechanically and/or personally identify spam/troll content, and ban their creators. Now, many people want them to stop doing that. Which they decline, since they KNOW what will be happening in that case. So, if you think you can do a bett…
Why not make the ban evident in a log of changes to a user's feed and allow that user to personally unban who they like? For a wide-swath of use cases from the recent past, the posts that incited the bans were not criminal in nature.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
When criticizing X, you cannot in good faith say — why don’t you build Y that’s like X? It just implicitly admits that criticizing X is off limits and you don’t like it.
Except that's not what's happening here. When doing anything on the internet "how are you going to control spam and obvious trolls" is question #1. Twitter has an answer to that: we mechanically and/or personally identify spam/troll content, and ban their creators. Now, many people want them to stop doing that. Which they decline, since they KNOW what will be happening in that case. So, if you think you can do a bett…
The discussion is about whether people can see what the algorithms are doing. Read only access to the code so they cannot manipulate people into their belief system or arbitrary shadow-ban rules.
You’re right about human judgement but that’s not the topic. The central point, I repeat emphatically, is about transparency, not governance.
Twitter can continue exactly the same way but just be transparent. The intense pushback is because they’ve holed themselves into an untenable position? Not sure why people are so against transparency. Maybe they lied in congressional testimonies?
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#25I wish they'd just let me control what I see. Sure, throw an occasional ad in there to make money. It would be hard to blame them for the nastiness on Twitter if they didn't control it.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#26Sounds like a bad idea. Bad actors would immediately exploit it and figure out how to most effectively flood everyone with spam, same as if Google's exact algorithms were public. Not everything has to be open.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#27I think this is a great idea, and it shouldn't be limited to Twitter. Youtube recommendation algorithms should be handled similarly, indeed any public-facing system needs to be honest about the kind of spin they're putting on their recommendatiuon algorithms. Even better, allow the users to spin the dials when it comes down to their own particular searches/results. > “One of the things I believe Twitter should do is…
> allow the users to spin the dials
If I could pick something to regulate about recommendation algorithms, probably a big part of it would be mandating consumer controls over the algorithm. Complete transparency might be hard when sometimes even the programmers of these systems don't have the ability to see why they recommend what they do, but there should definitely also be mandatory oversight by consumer protection agencies that have full ability to audit the code and report on it.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#28Recommender systems like Twitter are as much about data as they are about code. Without the dataset and the derived statistics and models that are used for ranking and recall, the code is not going to help much with transparency.
Re: Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure there is anything to gain here. Moderation is inherently subjective, especially at the scale of Twitter. The same people would just continue arguing about what should and should not be moderated and how.
Transparency would be helpful. At the very least it would cut off the speculation about what did or didn't behind the scenes. Right now it's a black box.
transparency would mean that every action they take gets scrutinized to absurdity, there’s no way they’d open that door of their own volition