691–700 of 1001 posts
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…
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.
The repo suggests it's about tracking engagement metrics[0], so Team Red people see more Team Red content and vice versa. Nothing nefarious. [0] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many unnecessarily cynical takes here. Let's say you were in charge of a large legacy system that some segment of customers complain about it not working for them as well as other segments. How would you know whether their complaints are valid unless you measured it? You have to know first. So measure it.
You can dismiss the complaint without measurement if you are confident in two things: 1. Your system does nothing to actually segment this specific group by their identity. 2. You are confident that the systems you have set up to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior are accurate. If both of those are true, you know that even if the group is being disproportionately negatively impacted by some form of recommen…
That is exactly what Twitter's stance has been all along (in the pre-Elon era) and it IS a problem for the product because people being silenced due to their own bad behavior (example: misgendering transgender people) feel an injustice is being done. The rule-makers get to set the range of acceptable discourse on Twitter and those to the right of center have felt unfairly disadvantaged by the way it was done in the past.
Over time this has eroded trust in the product. Just because people aren't being labeled and ranked based on whether they are red team or blue team, the people deciding what "good" and "bad" behavior looks like on the platform have the power to disproportionately impact these groups.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If engagement on the tweets of that user goes down after a change has been implemented, you can roll back the change to prevent that user from being negatively impacted.
What if engagements around that user naturally declined, perhaps due to that user going off the deep end. Wouldn’t this just serve to bias the algorithm toward propping up the exposure of that user? Do they even care about the control so long as that user’s engagement is up and to the right?
From that viewpoint, it does make some sense to use his account as measurement point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are millions of lines of code existent. There are thousands added. Your prior for it being Elon's addition should be something like 10,000/1,000,000 or roughly 1/100. The prior that it wasn't Elon's change is going to be something like 99/100. When you add the additional information that Elon wants the code removed, but existing Twitter engineers think it appropriate to keep this actually increases the probabil…
Why is lines of code the appropriate input here? Here's a different computation that is at least as plausible: There are hundreds of millions of users. Let's say 300M. Only a single one is special-cased in this code: the narcisistic CEO who reportedly went ballistic when his engagement metrics went down. The prior that it's a change done in response to his demands is 299999999/300000000. (But of course it was added b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right wing high engagement accounts. Through in one or two accounts like @AOC for "balance"
BTW: How @aoc got three-letter handle?
It'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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well someone just asked about it in the live spaces[1] Elon is hosting and he said that should not be there. An engineer said afterwards it is just for metrics but then Elon chimed in again and said "we should get rid of it, it should be gone." [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1641880448061120513?s=20
Doesn't necessarily mean he didn't want it there in the first place. Why else would it be there?
From 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…
From 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…