Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author_is_elon flag doesn't surprise me, but the two political designators are somewhat shocking. I'd sure like to know what changes based on what Twitter knows about your political affiliation.
I thought it was interesting how it explicitly doesn't boost independents. So much of the two-party system is self-reinforcing.
Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#612It's disappointing the comments are so obsessed with the political angle to this that there's a total lack of appreciation (or discussion) of opening up the most influential social media platform in the world.
One of the things that makes my spidey sense tingle is when people say oddly sycophantic things about Elon Musk. Twitter is big, it's important. It's not "the most influential social media platform in the world".
It's quite odd to attribute objective analysis to sycophancy. I intentionally didn't mention him but here you are bringing him up and fulfilling my point. Who is the sycophant?
Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they could pretend to be open. It's the "Open"AI model. Open-washing?
There is clearly a lot of information to share. It's worth considering this could be step 1 of n as opposed to assuming the worst possible intention.
Why be transparent (or try to appear transparent)? To convince people to trust your platform (or to recruit - which seems to be another goal of the post). Why would Twitter want or need to do this now? Well, there is a bit of context. This disclosure doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#614Great! 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…
Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only anecdotally. But ever since Musk took over the amount of US political content has significantly increased in particular from the right despite me not living in the US. It's hard to tell whether previously political content was weighted less and Musk has removed those controls or whether they are now weighted higher.
Some of the power users Musk reportedly had boosted are specifically right wing political posters, like catturd2. But then he's also boosted some high profile left leaning politicians, so it's not exclusive. It does mean you're more likely to see right wing American political content either way, which has to be annoying for people outside of the US. https://gizmodo.com/twitter-algorithm-aoc-ben-shapiro-cattur...
Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is transparency theatre, not actual transparency. There's no way to actually use this limited release to understand how or why any tweet is boosted, so we're in exactly the same boat we were in yesterday.
This sentiment has high correlation to driving conclusions from a very time limited information set. This isn't the only part that is going to be posted to github. What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives? I don't understand the purpose of that approach. Help me.
This seems to be unsubstantiated. Are you really claiming that selective disclosure is always superior to complete lack of transparency?
Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#617From https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92... ( "author_is_elon", candidate => candidate .getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None).contains(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsElonFeature, 0L))), ( "author_is_power_user", candidate => candidate .getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None) .exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsVitsFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)), ( "author_is_democrat", candidate => candidate .getOrEls…
Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#618Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#619From https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92... ( "author_is_elon", candidate => candidate .getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None).contains(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsElonFeature, 0L))), ( "author_is_power_user", candidate => candidate .getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None) .exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsVitsFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)), ( "author_is_democrat", candidate => candidate .getOrEls…
So, for technical / performance reasons, changes to the algos might want to be benchmarked against this account in particular, because it’s the account most likely to be at the centre of capacity- / load-related issues.
Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also how about.... everyone else in the world who is not an American voter?
This is what it means to let another country own your social media. Their ideas and memes unconsciously get preferential treatment. This is maybe not a good thing, but it is what it is.
But it's indeed an interesting fact that people seem to specifically seek American tech and social media. And honestly, there's no shortages of foreign nationals commenting on American politics (and it's a good thing, it's their right thanks to the first amendment!).