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Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

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Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#561

Post by Washuu »

dmonitor wrote: post #285
phailhaus wrote: post #163

Great! But nothing is going to change until people realize that the problem is the feedback loop . It's not the recommendation engine itself, it's the fact that there's no way "out" of the feed that the engine produces. It recommends you stuff, you have little choice but to engage with it, and then it trains on that information . This is the problem with most of social media today. It is a very well known problem in…

reminds me of a story about a guy who was given a gift, a decorative plate with a rooster on it i think it was. didn’t care for it too much, but out of politeness put it on display on an empty cabinet he had. a while later someone noticed he had it and figured he liked it, so got him a similar decorative plate with a rooster on it. again, out of politeness, he put it next to the old one. now other people started to t…

I have a whole shelf full of horse stuff because of this!~

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#562

Post by avanti »

meghan_rain wrote: post #106
jonathanmayer wrote: post #45

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?

It's no secret that Twitter, like any other social media platform, is driven by user engagement and ad revenues. The more time we spend on the platform, the more valuable it becomes for them. With this new open-source algorithm, they're essentially crowdsourcing improvements to their system to better serve us the content we crave.

this move could be seen as a strategic PR play to boost their public image amidst the growing concerns around algorithmic bias and lack of transparency. By inviting the community to collaborate and address these issues, they're not only shifting some of the responsibility onto the users but also deflecting potential criticism.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#563

Post by jefftk »

db48x wrote: post #551
threeseed wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That lines up with reporting from Casey Newton a few days ago where a handful of VIPs e.g. Musk, LeBron James, AOC were being used as weather vanes to understand what the algorithm was doing. It definitely isn't just metrics. Any algorithm change that negatively affected Musk was clearly not going live.

Do you think the code looked like that prior to Elon's purchase? I suspect that there was another name there before. Separately, which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?

> which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?

When you run an A/B test you randomly divide your users into groups, one (treatment) getting the new behavior and one (control) getting the current production behavior. So your question doesn't make much sense?

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#564

Post by sva_ »

nailer wrote: post #428
sva_ wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, the group of Elons. I was wondering why I see so many tweets by him, and what his "Group's" impression quote is. This is actually pretty hilarious.

That’s not how it works. See the parent.

They said that they use it for metrics, so clearly there must be an "elon impression" metric.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#565

Post by panarky »

willdr wrote: post #543
eldritch_4ier wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What are you talking about? Do you remember January 6?

Everybody remembers January 6 except those who want to pretend it didn't happen.

How many remember the floods of Twitter incitement to hit the gas in their F-150 trucks to run over protesters, and then how many people actually perpetrated vehicle attacks?

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#566

Post by KarlKemp »

panarky wrote: post #512
roughly wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect they're tracking the red team/blue team metrics because of the political shitstorm that's been the GOP's assertions they're being silenced by The Algorithm.

The fallacy of false equivalence systematized in code. Now one side can spew as much disinfo and incitement to violence as it likes, and any algorithm change that prevents this shit from getting amplified will be rejected as bias. BSaaS = Both Sides as a Service

Well, technically they are looking for relative changes, not equal total exposures.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#568

Post by phailhaus »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #523
phailhaus wrote: post #163

Great! But nothing is going to change until people realize that the problem is the feedback loop . It's not the recommendation engine itself, it's the fact that there's no way "out" of the feed that the engine produces. It recommends you stuff, you have little choice but to engage with it, and then it trains on that information . This is the problem with most of social media today. It is a very well known problem in…

Don't you have a choice.. to not engage with it? If you didn't like it then assuming the metrics system is working correctly, this would be negative feedback to the ML model, causing said content to not be shown in the future.

Couple problems:

1. Actively supplying negative feedback is sometimes hidden behind secondary menus, making it much higher friction compared to just...scrolling past. So most users don't spend the effort. Even with a dislike button, it's unclear what the system is learning. It can't know that I don't like this particular video because it's a conspiracy theory, and to stop showing me those. These platforms often don't even support explicit categories, so how would they know?

2. It's extremely high friction to teach the algorithm you're interested in something that it doesn't suggest to you! There's the whole unknown unknowns problem: how do you teach the algorithm you're interested in something that you've never seen before?

I still think Reddit has handled this the best. No system is perfect, but Reddit's challenges are much more manageable than the quagmire that TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube have gotten themselves into. I can just unsubscribe from r/conspiracy, and I'm out. Basically impossible to teach that to YouTube without weeks of careful curation. They think they're smart enough to know what I like, but they're not and never will be.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#569

Post by ceejayoz »

nonethewiser wrote: post #376
6d6b73 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not but it's the twitter that gets value from celebrities. How many people are on social networks jusy so see what their fav celebrites are doing?

It obviously goes both ways. Social media is a megaphone and ego boost for celebs.

Twitter needs the LeBrons of the world far more than they need Twitter.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#570

Post by dmix »

HAL3000 wrote: post #558

Expect to see A LOT more spam on Twitter after this release. It's like giving SEO spammers access to google search ranking algorithm.

Stuff like this always has consequences, it doesn’t mean it’s a net negative for society. It means you need to adapt and actually fix the problems, while also benefiting more from the accountability.
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