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Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

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Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#771

Post by llx2 »

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?

bc he have no devs anymore and thinks the community will fix it for free

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#772

Post by phailhaus »

zrezzed wrote: post #582
phailhaus wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Twitter could recreate a similar system: 1) auto-tag tweets with labels, rather than users needing to submit to subreddits 2) auto-sub most people some default set of labels 3) let them un-sub if they want. They just don't want to.

Auto-tagging is not a business they want to be in, because they will invariably get it wrong sometimes and people will start drama over it. And they'd be right to: human communication is nuanced and you can't just "guess" what someone means within 280 characters.

People already use hashtags, what would happen if you could subscribe to them? It would create a whole new way of interacting with the platform, something closer to Reddit where people post to streams. But the fact that these streams can't be moderated (or even downvoted) might be a nonstarter.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#773

Post by jjeaff »

OJFord wrote: post #689
SequoiaHope wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if they say “we will open source the algorithm” and then what they really open source is a little bit of slightly relevant code that doesn’t allow us to understand the algorithm, then what we can deduce is that they are trying to weasel out of public commitments. I can’t say for sure if that happened, but if they made a clear promise and then did something else, it’s perfectly reasonable to call that out.

Devil's advocate though: imagine you were to open source (probably with quite a short deadline) some 'algorithm' used in whatever you work on, but the rest should stay private; how would you go about that? I don't think it's easy, there's inherently some interface(s!) where it's a hand-wavey 'get the thing from the private bit', and defining that sensibly is hard, and if you try to do it well will probably lead to a…

If you were doing it in good faith, you wouldn't need to publish the actual code. Most likely you should publish an article and a flowchart explaining how the algorithm works. Publishing a partial chunk of code just creates a story that supporters who don't understand can parrot that "they opened their algorithm".

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#774

Post by mort96 »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #623
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still hear reverse-FUD about nvidia supposedly fully open-sourcing their Linux driver, when in reality they opened a tiny kernel portion of it that allows the main proprietary blob to connect to necessary kernel interfaces. You have to call out this bullshit when you see it.

Wait, what? AFAIU what you say is true, except for the part where the “main proprietary blob” does not run on the CPU. This isn’t as glorious as an actual open-source driver would be, but it does have meaningful advantages—e.g. you now have a ghost of a chance of implementing Nvidia GPU support on a non-Linux kernel, by uploading the GPU-side blob and rewriting the CPU-side shim as required. Or is the blob license-re…

The "main proprietary blob" they're talking about is the userspace portion of the driver; the portion which does all of the heavy lifting. That definitely runs on your CPU. The only part they open-sourced is the kernel portion of the driver, which just exists to facilitate communication between the userspace driver and the hardware.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#775

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#776

Post by mort96 »

cubefox wrote: post #541
misiti3780 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

"Way too negatively"? We're talking about one of the world's most influential people who uses their power to randomly accuse innocent normal people of being pedophiles. There is no portrayal too negative.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#777

Post by Joeri »

smt88 wrote: post #477
corbulo wrote: post #201

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.

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.

I did find the article more enlightening than the source code. I always suspected the quality of a tweet did not factor in to its promotion, only its engagement, and now they have confirmed this to be the case. Now I understand better why twitter seems to be filled with people angrily retweeting what I consider to be low quality clickbait tweets.

As long as they don’t try to tackle tweet quality at all separately from engagement twitter will remain unappealing to me.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#778

Post by slim »

cubefox wrote: post #765
evolve2k wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elons reply “I only learned about it now!”. What a crock of shit. We literally went through reporting a few months back where he was clearly instructing the team to make sure his tweets always come up, for everyone.

> We literally went through reporting a few months back where he was clearly instructing the team to make sure his tweets always come up, for everyone. Feel free to give me a source for that, but I'm pretty sure that's not true.

looks like evolve2k is himself the source. maybe he was a twitter employee ?

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#779

Post by chocolatkey »

klodolph wrote: post #748
chocolatkey wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree the quality of posts has gone downhill, and is way too political for my liking, but there's not much other place to go that isn't elitist.

Discord. As much as I hate Discord the platform (and I really do hate it, far more than, say, Twitter), Discord does have a lot of good communities.

I don't think Discord is a substitute for HN. If I know an exact community with a shared interest I want to join then yes, I can find their Discord an join it. But how am I supposed to come across that topic and become interested in the first place? HN (in its ideal form) is a place where I am introduced to a variety of random but potentially interesting technology-related topics, from programming languages to passion projects to lessons in business etc, some of which I will pursue and seek out a community for, and others which I only care about minimally, not enough to want to join a dedicated community for.

If you want to compare HN to Discord, I would say that HN is like joining 500 Discord servers that together comprise the type of content discussed and posted about on HN, and every day checking each one's announcements channel, and skimming through general chats. But you still have the issue of being introduced to new topics, for example if you're interested in the AI trends then your selection of Discord servers that comprise what's posted on HN would be dramatically changing in the past few months.

Re: Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

#780

Post by rhaway84773 »

fknorangesite wrote: post #696
coolspot wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW: How @aoc got three-letter handle?

Probably exactly the most boring, mundane way you would expect: they managed to contact the owner of what was probably a dead/inactive account and then paid them some money for it.

AOC is also not a very common/popular three letter combination.
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