911–920 of 1001 posts
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I think it was more narcissistic than that. As in: "My tweets are very important, if they don't show up on top, it means the algorithm can't recognize what is important, it needs to be fixed". And the team, who probably didn't see in which way Elon Musk's tweets could be that important besides the fact that he wrote them, they just decided to give Elon Musk's tweets a boost.
Now someone is surely getting fired.
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> I thought it was interesting how it explicitly doesn't boost independents. So much of the two-party system is self-reinforcing. Is it boosting? Others are claiming this code is just for metrics collection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391896 . But on the topic of Democrats vs. Republican vs. independent; a big factor may be that "Democrat" and "Republican" are much more cohesive groups and therefore much…
Metrics collection so they can avoid bias, allegedly
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…
Isn’t this top of the page disclaimer relevant for you? It seems not to be part of the main branch.
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I have had it reset a couple times on mobile a few months ago but at least recently I have not noticed it happening anymore.
Just pressing the home icon twice takes it back to For You.
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Yep. I work for Big Tech, and our CI was lacking for a very long time. Integration testing isn't prioritized at all. Ironic to write code in an overly pedantic language with type safety, spend 3X that time on unit tests with near-100% coverage and what-if analysis, and still have the thing just not work in the end. For my own projects, I went TDD with integration tests first, and it paid off in both the short and lon…
I think the impressive thing would've been you being able to achieve that while coordinating with multiple other people. Anybody can write "perfect" code with enough reading/practice. I think being able to fit your code within the context of a codebase is another skillset entirely and presents entirely different challenges regardless of management influence
I only write code that's just good enough. My goal was to quickly handle the business requirements that were a bit of a moving target and keep prod stable, and I did. If we had more people, a few parts of it would've been handed off as services that work similarly to my piece. And I know they would've been fine because my system was nothing special or pretentious, just your typical NodeJS/Postgres backends plus a few other pieces. The frontend devs understood it well enough to tweak new features occasionally if I was asleep.
Big Tech(tm) team would've been fine with this too. We have roughly the same-size system and resources I did, and similar relations with internal customers, except 5 backend SWEs instead of 1, and except we're forced to do things the hard way. FRs take forever, and the system is flaky.
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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?
I doubt that Twitter and most of these social platforms are driven by Ai... Maintaining and changing complex algos could not be done on a rapid pace like what occurs now... I think Twitter has moderators, and scripts that control everything, and it can be more easily adjusted to tweak what is visible on the platform based on whatever agenda they want to represent (politics, revenue, PR/damage control).
Twitter frequently bends the rules to serve celebrities, politics, and sponsors and for that they need to be able to quickly adjust scripts. True Ai is meant to function on it's own with minimal intervention, and therein a simple change to a massive logic scheme would completely FUBAR everything.
I think there are rooms full of people that filter and either promote or suppress posts on Twitter every day, namely suppressing any tweets critical of the platform and it's owner... I've noticed that at night time hours, moderation of Tweets is less restrictive as a cue to what goes on there.
There are certain topics that are not moderated as heavily as others (3d Design and other non-controversial topics), and some topics (for example music and porn) that are restricted heavily visibility-wise because they force people to run ads to rank in trending (because it generates a lot of opportunistic money for Twitter as a platform).
Users that are critical of the platform and Elon and his allies (for example) can easily be neutered by moderators and put on shadow ban for any period of time in order to preserve the illusion of calm concerning Twitter operations. Complaints about Twitter only become visible when the majority of the audience tweets about problems (as that can't be moderated out without exposing moderation).
It's pretty much all smoke and mirrors there in order to maintain order in my opinion, and it's pretty much futile and torturous to people who just want to create and seize opportunity for their business without spending tons of money on platform marketing...
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…
Isn’t the “I’m not interested in this tweet”, “Show me fewer tweets from X”, etc options working for you? They seem to have an effect on my end.
Topics are better, but there doesn't seem to be a way to make sure your tweet ends up in a particular topic. Again, you have to pray to The Algorithm that it will label tweets correctly. And if your particular interest isn't a Topic, you're out of luck.