Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm(blog.twitter.com) |
Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm(blog.twitter.com) |
https://www.databreachtoday.com/twitter-says-source-code-lea...
Maybe we’ll all get lucky and Elon will cause Twitter to go away forever.
s.SpaceSafetyLabelType.MedicalMisinfo -> MedicalMisinfo,
s.SpaceSafetyLabelType.GenericMisinfo -> GenericMisinfo,
s.SpaceSafetyLabelType.DmcaWithheld -> DmcaWithheld,
s.SpaceSafetyLabelType.HatefulHighRecall -> HatefulHighRecall,
...
s.SpaceSafetyLabelType.UkraineCrisisTopic -> UkraineCrisisTopic,
https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1641976869460275201
Speaking about Ukraine, it seems to be literally a Twitter policy violation ... https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/visibilit...
Where's the beef?
The algorithm really needs to recognise when tweets are time-sensitive and not recommend them just because they got a lot of engagement the previous day!
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
"This method reduces the page rank of users who have a low number of followers but a high number of followings."
That's why you see so many trolls with very low follower counts; it's more effective to make/purchase a new firstname-bunchanumbers account and poop in people's replies than to let Twitter decide placement based on historical factors.
This should be seen as a possible snapshot of some code, that might have run, might run in the future, or is possibly running in some parts of the production infrastructure at Twitter.
I get way to much random crap now, promoted tweets, "thing that might interest me", users that seem to never get on my feed etc.
Twitter seems to go in the direction of all other social media, feeds that are 100% digital crack with no way to control your media diet.
That’s always been a risk of open source and not being hyper-centralized.
There is code that favor Elon's tweets so I'd yes that's probably what they use
They made my morning
I don't see any Typelevel stuff. This probably lets them hire and train engineers faster while still gaining most of the benefits
I hope this will encourage more companies to pick Scala.
the majority of users didn't ask for the this so not sure what's the exact motive behind thier efforts. it could be a PR stunt.
Maybe an UML graph or even a presentation or written guide on how they measure and apply each weigh or group policy would make it easier to have some solid take on how it works
author_is_uwu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid
It looks like once again these lot predicting that he won't open source the algorithm and are going to start eating their words again [0], just like they did around incorrectly predicting Twitter's immediate collapse [1] and will look at the source code anyway and continue to talk about "Twitter" again.
If Twitter can open-source their algorithm, Why not TikTok? Either way, the bots are now going to have a very expensive time on Twitter.
Even if it is 'easier', the bots are identified, down-ranked straight to the bottom and shadow-banned to invisibility. It is essentially evaporating money and time.
> The amount of spam I see has gone way up over the last 6 months.
Yeah. The spam has gone way up into smoke over the last 6 months. It is only going to get more expensive to spam as soon as the paid changes come in.
I especially like the suggestions to rewrite the algorithm in Rust [1] and this pull request which simplifies the algorithm to a single c file [2].
[1] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues?q=is%3Aissue... [2] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/pull/712
Twitter hmu if you need help trying Pytorch 2.0 ;)
See tweets from people I followed.
Don't see tweets from people I didn't follow.
Trust people I follow in their retweets to signal something interesting.
Unfollow unhelpful people.
Once that algorithm was rendered impossible, I left twitter.
Haven't missed it.
Having someone say- here's the way we are going to promote something to you- doesn't make me inclined to accept the promotion!
Weird reply.
private def getLinearRankingParams: ThriftRankingParams = { ThriftRankingParams( `type` = Some(ThriftScoringFunctionType.Linear), minScore = -1.0e100, retweetCountParams = Some(ThriftLinearFeatureRankingParams(weight = 20.0)), replyCountParams = Some(ThriftLinearFeatureRankingParams(weight = 1.0)), reputationParams = Some(ThriftLinearFeatureRankingParams(weight = 0.2)), luceneScoreParams = Some(ThriftLinearFeatureRankingParams(weight = 2.0)), textScoreParams = Some(ThriftLinearFeatureRankingParams(weight = 0.18)), urlParams = Some(ThriftLinearFeatureRankingParams(weight = 2.0)), isReplyParams = Some(ThriftLinearFeatureRankingParams(weight = 1.0)), favCountParams = Some(ThriftLinearFeatureRankingParams(weight = 30.0)), langEnglishUIBoost = 0.5, langEnglishTweetBoost = 0.2, langDefaultBoost = 0.02, unknownLanguageBoost = 0.05, offensiveBoost = 0.1, inTrustedCircleBoost = 3.0, multipleHashtagsOrTrendsBoost = 0.6, inDirectFollowBoost = 4.0, tweetHasTrendBoost = 1.1, selfTweetBoost = 2.0, tweetHasImageUrlBoost = 2.0, tweetHasVideoUrlBoost = 2.0, useUserLanguageInfo = true, ageDecayParams = Some(ThriftAgeDecayRankingParams(slope = 0.005, base = 1.0)) ) }
https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1641905502043926530?...
My conclusion is that it's basically entertainment, with very little of what I'd call high-quality useful information that deserves further examination (unlike a lot of HN posts, in contrast). I also notice something of a Tik-Tok approach to video being implemented, which is not surprising given Tik-Tok's success (and makes one wonder who exactly it is lobbying so hard for a Tik-Tok ban, and whether it's just a commercial competition issue more than anything else).
As far as the recommendation algorithm, it appears to be a siloing setup - look at content of one particular flavor, it gives you more of that flavor. A 'flush settings' or 'forget browsing history' or 'reset to defaults' button would be useful, if probably not what advertisers want in terms of delivering to target audiences. I suppose setting up multiple accounts is something of a solution, although too much effort to be that interesting.
In terms of news reports, it's broader in scope than traditional corporate media outlets, so that's a plus in its favor. Reliability is perhaps similar (i.e. low).
So this language is Elon signaling that he's presenting the "woke hivemind's" head on a platter.
What does the commit history say? There are 3 commits, like a very very real programming project. The issues and pull requests show how much people are fooled by this very transparent move.
So this is an obvious attempt at a digital potemkin village, that like the real one, poorly succeeds in hiding the truth. Elon does not not want to upset the apple cart (political economical or ideological) but make his followers believe in it, and so we get this. Great spectacle, if that's what you're interested in.
The default feed view has grown increasingly useless over the past ~6 months.
The people who are willing to pay to be heard more seem to be willing because everyone is already tired of listening to them.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/timeliner...
If some people you follow are more important than others (family) that doesn't matter to the stream, and you get bogged down by less important messages.
I think some "algorithm" is necessary, but people will disagree on the balance. (It's unfortunately in twitter's interest to push all kinds of random shallow stuff and get people addicted to that.) I hope mastodon can maybe provide some flexibility and customizability in terms of what the mix between recent and likely to be interesting should be, and what interesting means to you.
Not that I use twitter much, but since it became clear that Elon made sure to promote himself in the algorithmic feeds, I've avoided "For you" anyway since I don't accept that in my mix of messages.
Reminds me of the Sirius Cybernetics Nutri-matic drinks machine.
That makes me think, this is actually a good call. Twitter can claim that they have complete transparency while not allowing anyone to touch their code (because it is GPL). "Anyone" being future competitors. If it was BSD licensed, it'd be tremendously useful in building a Twitter competitor (on paper, you still need network effects, I am just spitballing to make a point).
You can tell that those who rushed in to find something to criticize can't, when they are reduced to making jokes about coding stylistic conventions.
#!/bin/sh
exit 0- author_is_elon: the problem is his tweets suck. stop recommending them.
- Include 'who viewed my profile' option in twitter
- Only one commit on repo
- How do I use it?
- Cool
- allow "AI" to tweet and like tweets on your behalf
- IMPORTANT: Guys please keep this place for real bugs and contributions,
etc...
Wow, we're getting some collaboration going!
```
def query_keys(self, language, task=2, size="50"):
if task == 2:
if language == "ar":
self.query_settings["adhoc_v2"]["table"] = "..."
elif language == "tr":
self.query_settings["adhoc_v2"]["table"] = "..."
elif language == "es":
self.query_settings["adhoc_v2"]["table"] = f"..."
else:
self.query_settings["adhoc_v2"]["table"] = "..."
return self.query_settings["adhoc_v2"]
if task == 3:
return self.query_settings["adhoc_v3"]
raise ValueError(f"There are no other tasks than 2 or 3. {task} does not exist.")
Is is it there to help fight impersonations? should be solved with Twitter Blue already?
There was reports of people receiving notifications about Musk tweets despite not following him, so..
20-25% noise isn’t a great ratio for something that I ostensibly curate.
Begs the question, why make it obvious?
It’s not about hiding old work, but changes just before making it public.
This is standard practice when it comes to open-sourcing such repos that were closed-source for years.
Well written article, from an engineer's perspective.
Ranking is achieved with a ~48M parameter neural network that is continuously trained on Tweet interactions to optimize for positive engagement (e.g. Likes, Retweets, and Replies). This ranking mechanism takes into account thousands of features and outputs ten labels to give each Tweet a score, where each label represents the probability of an engagement. We rank the Tweets from these scores.
I also fail to see how someone who is annoyed by code that doesn't follow well established standards is somehow not a good fit in the C-suite.
"Use 4 spaces per indentation level."
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-use-2-spaces-for-Pytho...
has_toxicity_score_above_threshold
is a interesting value, I wonder were the 0.91 was though up at
Search for Elon gives this: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/search?q=Elon&type=
Of course it could also be that they change their mind when spammers abuse the openness.
> The pipeline above runs approximately 5 billion times per day and completes in under 1.5 seconds on average. A single pipeline execution requires 220 seconds of CPU time, nearly 150x the latency you perceive on the app.
Energy costs per user is also interesting, if at all close, at 0.25c per kWh the power consumption cost per user would be greater than 5$ per year.
Edit: hi friend
Perhaps this calls for an HN poll...
I should add, I dont think all of it is a joke, but stuff like the "author_is" labels are incomplete and only 4 were shown for the bit
I want to see a chronological list of things sources I follow have posted.
Yes, I understand you can do this on Twitter still, but I would guess most people are more influenced by "the algorithm".
Maybe this is helpful to anyone for navigating what's in there!
Like a dig at the code quality.
I found it interesting that there is no attribution. Most other companies list the authors on engineering blogs (eg. Facebook, Uber, etc.)
This topic seems to draw the attention of unhinged people, so I suppose I wouldn't want my name on it either.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3928219-musk-was-denie...
for Google Ads, you couldn't easily know what ads would be shown for a given query, without a whole lot of data that's not contained in any code: the experiment settings in the server, for one thing. And the user who's doing the query, for another.
An "experiment" could apply to 100% of the traffic, so it's not really an experiment anymore. And even if you think X has been put into production, there is still a "holdback" experiment, where some part of the traffic does not get X applied to it.
And i don't even live in the US.
It would explain why they are tracking it, to increase visibility.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/tree/main/src/java/...
Then there are some reasons specific to Java itself. For one, the JVM is just incredibly slow to start up, and I hate having to deal with Java-based tooling. Gradle is infuriating to work with for that reason (and others). I'm also incredibly uneasy regarding anything made by Oracle, I definitely don't want to add a critical dependency on an Oracle product just to be able to use a build system which may or may not arguably be slightly better in some areas. I know OpenJDK is a community project, but it's one that's completely dependent on Oracle. With Oracle's recent-ish hostile moves regarding LTS builds of OpenJDK, I'm even more wary than normal.
[1] You may point out that Meson is written in Python, which means using Meson adds a dependency on Python. And yeah, I think that's totally fair, and I would respect someone's decision to use CMake instead of Meson to avoid adding all of Python as a dependency. But Python falls in a different category for me personally, because: 1) a lot of my projects end up with a build-time dependency on Python regardless of build systems, since Python is what I use for things like custom preprocessors and random scripts; 2) the sorts of systems I care about (Linux, macOS) tend to come with Python anyway; and 3) I trust the Python foundation way more than I trust Oracle.
The fear for Oracle is also completely irrational, Java is probably the safest bet ever — it is not tied to processor architecture, has a specification both on the language and the JVM level (both are uncommon in other platforms), has multiple completely independent implementation and the majority of fortune 500 companies definitely have business critical infrastructure running on top of it, so even if Oracle would do something those can single handedly support the platform indefinitely.
Especially that Oracle has been a surprisingly good steward of the language, and they were the ones that finished open sourcing everything.
100% disagree. Waiting multiple seconds as the tool starts up just to get to the point where it actually invokes a compiler is infuriating to me. If you don't have a problem with that, good for you I guess.
> The fear for Oracle is also completely irrational
Again, I 100% disagree. Have you seen how they're treating ZFS? And the lawsuit against Google shows that they consider copying their APIs to be copyright infringement, so I wouldn't bank on non-Oracle-sanctioned community re-implementations.
If you want to tie your C++ code to Oracle, I won't stop you, but I won't be doing that. I'm happy that you found a build tool you like. I will stick with one that's not based on Java.
I think Java’s startup time is often overblown, a hello world literally finishes in less than 0.1s, and that won’t significantly grow at the size of a build tool. Plus daemons are a thing. Also, there is not much point in starting the compiler when you don’t even know whether it is necessary.
As for ZFS, what do you mean? Not familiar with the situation, it is open-source and several open source OSs use it without any trouble. It’s just Linus’s overprotective stance against mixing two open-source licenses that makes it unmergable into the kernel, but I do use ZFS on linux every day, so where is the evilness of Oracle?
I don't want to manage Cargo.toml or requirements.txt or pyproject.toml or package.json or whatever. It's all the same stuff - just a dag of dependencies, each has it's own type and output and build pipeline and defaults and env vars etc.
Bazem, from what I've heard, is the best. Maybe that is the reason for the lack of adoption - it's very good but not good enough?
PS. I never used Bazel
The problem isn't hello world, it's the start-up time of big jars. My experience tells me that JVM start-up time on actual large software projects is a real issue in practice. But I haven't used Bazel in particular; I'd be more interested in numbers for that than numbers for hello world.
> As for ZFS, what do you mean? [...] It’s just Linus’s overprotective stance against mixing two open-source licenses that makes it unmergable into the kernel
Haha, that's not right. The problem is that ZFS's license, the CDDL, is (intentionally) incompatible with the GPL, so you can't link CDDL code against GPL code. It's not just an issue with making it part of the main Linux tree either, it's probably not even legal for distros to even ship a ZFS kernel module, since that has to link against Linux's GPL code (according to common interpretations of the licenses; Canonical notably disagrees).
And let me repeat that this mess was intentional on the part of Sun when they made the CDDL (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...), and it remains intentional on the part of Oracle as they choose to keep ZFS under the CDDL.
The mechanism which prevents Linus from merging ZFS into the kernel, and the mechanism which prevents distros from shipping ZFS out of the box, is the exact same mechanism which prevents Linus from merging any other GPL-incompatible code or distros from shipping any other GPL-incompatible kernel modules.
Nothing is stopping any individual from grabbing the OpenZFS source code and linking it against their Linux kernel; that's legal. Oracle is just doing its best to prevent people from combining OpenZFS and Linux into one package and distributing the result.
But I think I'll leave the discussion here, it's not about build systems anymore. As I have already said, if your take on Oracle is that they're a trustworthy company and a good steward of crucial parts of your stack, go ahead and use Bazel, I'm not stopping you.
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 a couple valuable components in [1]). Without those, we can't evaluate the behavior and possible effects of "the algorithm."
I am assuming that open sourcing the code aims to increase transparency about the business logic of the ranking decisions. At the same time you don't want spammers to be able to easily run experiments against a cloned version of your system.
Haven't gone through yet, but yeah, if that's the case, all this is, is a glorified framework to plug your own in.. Not exactly what was promised.
From a quick clone and line-count, it has:
235 kLOC .scala
136 kLOC .java
22 kLOC .py
7 kLOC .rs
I also haven't skimmed this code except very superficially, but perhaps you should since you're out there making statements with your Princeton credentials.
(I posted this comment with the heads-up a few minutes after your comment above and then expanded it as you didn't respond.)
More credits would be given if the very idea of open sourcing the algorithm hasn't already been discussed to death with predictions of the difficult points and how it probably won't happen in any sane way.
Ignoring the global nature of Twitter for a moment.
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.
And neither can spammers find and test the cracks and edge cases that would allow them to break the system, that does sound reasonable to me. If they were public there would be an arms race between spammers/those wishing to game the system and Twitter engineers.
This is the problem with most of social media today. It is a very well known problem in ML [1], but nobody is willing to do anything about it because it's a fundamental UX change. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, they have defined themselves by their recommendation engines.
[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/dangerous-feedback-loops-in-m...
If Twitter wants to put a stop to the user exodus and save lots of money in the process, here's what they could do:
1) Add an off switch to the for you feed. I'll click it right away and never turn it on again. Stop wasting minutes of CPU time on my behalf. I never asked for it. It doesn't do anything for me that I need or want.
2) Sort by time, filter by hashtag. Twitter used to be about real time information. I don't care about things that happened days or weeks ago. I don't need to see all of it. This is the core feature that made Twitter popular. Mastodon has it and it is absorbing users from Twitter by the millions. It still works. Restore this feature and make it the default.
3) Join the fediverse. That's where a lot of the former hard core users went. They still exist. They still post messages. They still engage with each other. They just don't use Twitter anymore. Allow people to follow mastodon users. Allow mastodon users to follow Twitter users. Not that hard to implement and probably would do wonders for user engagement.
Following IS sorted by time, though.
That's probably one of the biggest reasons that I have remained on Twitter even after setting up a Mastodon persona.
The existing user base is strongly in favour of a more organic social graph from exploring tags for shared interests.
Browsing tags is a very normal thing to do on the platform.
// we only keep unfollows in the past 90 days due to the huge size of this dataset,
// and to prevent permanent "shadow-banning" in the event of accidental unfollows.
// we treat unfollows as less critical than above 4 negative signals, since it deals more with
// interest than health typically, which might change over time.
val unfollows: SCollection[InteractionGraphRawInput] =
GraphUtil
.getSocialGraphFeatures(
readSnapshot(SocialgraphUnfollowsScalaDataset, sc),
FeatureName.NumUnfollows,
endTs)
.filter(_.age < 90)
(
"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
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsDemocratsFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
(
"author_is_republican",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsRepublicansFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
)https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/ci/ci.sh
Permalink: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
And thank you to everyone at Twitter who helped organize this release. Open sourcing something like this is no small effort.
Sadly, I think their best open-source contribution days are behind them with all the hardcore engineering they now have to do with fewer engineers.
Edit: I forgot about Bootstrap! That projects saved the world from millions of ugly web apps and dashboards built by clueless backend engineers.
But yeah, while I would never work for Elon I’m glad he did this.
[1]: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/home-mixe...
- https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
- https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml
Blogs:
- Eng: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...
- Biz: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2023/a-new-era...
I have spent significant effort creating a network and there you go choosing to ignore my efforts by putting in 50% of crap-I-don't-want-to-see.
That is why I despise your algorithm.
They called it "Latest Tweets" https://web.archive.org/web/20200205092104/https://help.twit...
Edit: I reversed “for you” and “following” in my original reply.
Edit: Why am I downvoted? It literally did, it even was named as you'd expect it ("sort by latest" or something), tho the location was less obvious as it was under the stars icon above the feed.
> Today, the For You timeline consists of 50% In-Network Tweets and 50% Out-of-Network Tweets on average, though this may vary from user to user.
It would’ve been interesting to see what changes were made since Musk’s takeover. As someone who followed 5,000+ users, I know I never saw a tweet that wasn’t either from nor retweeted by someone I followed — e.g. I never saw those “[user you follow] liked [someone you don’t follow] tweet”
50%/50% in FYP seems to reflect my experience today — which is much worse, to the point that I’ll regularly switch to viewing by List b/c I miss seeing people who I want to read.
I wonder how much testing and analysis went into deciding on the 50/50 ratio — e.g. how does it impact user engagement and behavior. Because it sounds like an easy round value that you’d land on when thinking “users should be pushed out of their bubbles”
For ranking the candidates these predictions are combined into a score by
weighting them:
"recap.engagement.is_favorited": 0.5
"recap.engagement.is_good_clicked_convo_desc_favorited_or_replied": 11* (the
maximum prediction from these two "good click" features is used and weighted by
11, the other prediction is ignored).
"recap.engagement.is_good_clicked_convo_desc_v2": 11*
"recap.engagement.is_negative_feedback_v2": -74
"recap.engagement.is_profile_clicked_and_profile_engaged": 12
"recap.engagement.is_replied": 27
"recap.engagement.is_replied_reply_engaged_by_author": 75
"recap.engagement.is_report_tweet_clicked": -369
"recap.engagement.is_retweeted": 1 "recap.engagement.is_video_playback_50": 0.005
I wonder if this is why threads rank so obnoxiously high. They get artificially boosted by the author replying to their own tweet
Code: ( "has_gte_10k_favs", _.getOrElse(EarlybirdFeature, None).exists(_.favCountV2.exists(_ >= 1000))),
Should be: ( "has_gte_10k_favs", _.getOrElse(EarlybirdFeature, None).exists(_.favCountV2.exists(_ >= 10000))),
> the main neural network part of @Twitter recsys algo is based on 2021 work of #SinaWeibo - Chinese clone of Twitter
This does a lot of heavy lifting here.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
Not sure if it has what you were looking for (and maybe you already checked this repo, too!), but it's more relevant than the linked repo imo
Let's not focus criticism on an attempt to do something.
I know that open source code around commenting online directly impacted the direction my current team went building our community tooling.
I’ll take even a glimpse into the machinations of any social media giant. It’s better than nothing!
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml/blob/main/projec...
In realgraph you can see some of the things they keep track of, which include what you have in your address book, total time spent "dwelling" and a few other interesting nuggets.
The minority of people who understood what this was already worked for platform companies and wanted to again, and the few who didn't but also knew how invasive this was could always be discredited as conspiracy theorists.
Ever wonder who else gets those graphs from platform companies? Today this is all interesting, but a couple of weeks from now when this all sinks in, I wouldn't be surprised if I were mad as hell.
> We also took additional steps to ensure that user safety and privacy would be protected, including our decision not to release training data or model weights associated with the Twitter algorithm at this point.
> We also took additional steps to ensure that user safety and privacy would be protected, including our decision not to release training data or model weights associated with the Twitter algorithm at this point.
which is a shame.
[1]: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
When questioned, it turns out she never cared about or liked ducks. Someone gave her one and then it became the go to present for her for every occasion, for decades.
Decades of ducks.
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.
Worth exploring.
I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit actually has the best data on their user's preferences, because they let them explicitly decide what they want rather than playing this "hot and cold" game like TikTok. Those platforms also only let you subscribe to individual accounts, so they have to infer what your interests actually are.
But I already know what interests I have! I want to have videos about terrariums on my home page now, not in a week when I've watched enough. This is what I mean by recommendation systems not being good enough. They need to give the user more control over what they want to see, because they can never read my mind. Their recommendations will get even better with that information!
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.
But i agree it is a bad idea. The worst actors have money to buy the blue marks of an army of accounts.
This is basically making it easier for authoritarian governments to abuse it
So wonder if some value is wrong in one of those constants. Anyways, the blocking feature is broken..
/**
* These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are
* serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users.
* This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes
* that negatively impacts one group over others.
*/
It doesn't have to be in the algorithm for the systems to be tweaked to please Elon vanity metrics.
[I've been running lots of ML AB tests over the years, some in organizations of similar size & complexity as Twitter]
I was wondering why I see so many tweets by him, and what his "Group's" impression quote is.
This is actually pretty hilarious.
I suspect the flag corresponds to weights not present in the repo.
Additionally, from another Twitter engineer, the Democrat/Republican flags are apparently 10 years old and not important and do not have high feature importance.
It’ll be interesting to see what gets cut. Maybe just the Elon flag, but maybe others too.
If they remove his artificial boosts, he'll just turn around and shout at his engineers to reinolement it in another way.
Considering how Twitter is now getting a servance isn’t that bad of an idea TBH
Half the people that got promoted on my timeline were perpetually candidates for elections I couldn't vote in, and they _self-identified_ as Republican or Democrat in their own bios, or via the registration of their candidacy...
This is why I exclusively used to use Twitter in the "people I follow only" mode, and simply shut my account down when they pushed harder on the algorithm.
[0]https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1641880448061120513?s=20
What he wanted was everything that feature provides, without it ever being shown that it's there. But since he refuses to hire PR people and almost certainly came up with this idea in the last few days, no one was paid to hide its existence.
The next story out of Twitter will be the remaining engineers being threatened because Musk can't see his tweet statistics any more.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1641908130274525187?t=5t...
I am surprised at the number of inherently redundant and colinear features, though. (e.g. has_1_image, has_2_images, has_3_images, has_4_images)
https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1641902570921943044?s...
Or did they leave this in just so they could hold its removal up as an example of listening to the community?
No other social media platform will have this sort of accountability and public pressure to be better like having their recommendation algorithms public.
If !user.follows_author(author) then don't show tweet on timeline Else if tweet.timestamp is later than all other tweets show tweet first
This is vastly superior to any other possible recommendation algorithm because users can choose what tweets they see/don't see by whom they follow and everybody has an equal chance to have their tweets seen by their followers. When Twitter moved away from this, it rendered my timeline useless so I started just pulling up people's profiles to read their tweets in order and eventually deleted my (pseudonymous) account that had several thousand followers. Almost nobody was seeing my tweets anyway thanks to this algorithm and deleting the account did not prevent me from browsing accounts I'm interested in.
All Elon needed to do to fix Twitter was to reverse all of the bad changes they've made since 2015 or so and restore the platform to what it was in the late 00s/early 10s.
As with all of the media outlets that elevate these two private clubs into the arbiters of truth, votes for Community Notes have to be relatively balanced between the two parties. Bipartisanship is a trash metric for determining truth, but absolutely none of the people raging at Musk in this thread would disagree with it.
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.
private val DarkRequestAnnotation = "clnt/has_dark_request"
private val Democrats = "democrats"
private val Republicans = "republicans"
private val Elon = "elon"
private val Vits = "vits" /**
* This function returns the top most followed and verified userIds truncated to topK
*/
def vits(> This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository.
Is this new? Perhaps Twitter already removed the code from their main branch? Or was this just a joke from the beginning?
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/commit/ec83d01dcaeb...
Here's what Musk said:
> But we are deleting this bs. I only learned about it now! Will be gone by tomorrow.
Isn’t this top of the page disclaimer relevant for you? It seems not to be part of the main branch.
It's not an absolute rule, I've certainly inherited projects in a consulting capacity that were written by small teams and were atrocious. But more often than not, a small team working for a small company has fewer of the internal "forces" that incur "technical debt."
Those forces are things like
- Silo'd teams working on a common code base in parallel but never talking to each other, thus duplicating code and having wildly different conventions
- Layers of middle management each with different management styles, leading to inconsistency and product-wide short-cuts
- Dealing with sudden success-induced scalability disasters that result in bandaid solutions
- More employee churn which means that the way we did things yesterday is not the way we're doing things today because someone new is in charge ... more inconsistency in code and software decisions
- More "old code." Companies very rarely do rewrites and when they do they're often failures. So the bigger the company, the more "legacy" spaghetti code typically because you don't fix what isn't broken (especially when the entire system is broken because it's one big giant mess that no one understands and yet somehow it actually works ... as long as we don't breathe on it or get a sudden surge of new account sign-ups).
For my own projects, I went TDD with integration tests first, and it paid off in both the short and long term. Soon after activated CI (thanks Heroku Pipelines). Actual functionality was more complex than what my day job project does, and my way of doing things wouldn't have been allowed there, yet it was more stable in the end. Amazing what you can do when nobody is telling you what to do.
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$GIT_COMMIT_BRANCH" = "main" ]; then
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
else
printf 'LGTM!\n'
exit 0
fi #!/bin/true
I also had jobs where CI/CD were completely accessory, but in exchange we were doing a lot more work on our local machines and deploy pipelines.
In comparison I currently see repos where remote editing files straight from gitlab and merging the changes is enough to get everything shipped.
I see it as a difference in philosophy more than what's best or "professional".
Being able to DM people is incredible. It's the AOL Messenger of 2023. If it went offline, it'd be a terrible loss.
https://i.imgur.com/F8GSeyH.png
And, no, this wasn't in a merge-request, it was in the "main" branch of HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala.
\*
\* These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are
\* serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users.
\* This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes
\* that negatively impacts one group over others.
\*
This is just one feed (the "For You" recommendations feed), they also have the "following" feed tab next to it that is 100% your network (want you want), and it remembers your selection when you change between them (they fixed that a few months ago), so really this is kind of a pointless thing to despise for that reason. It's just an option you can 100% avoid if you don't want to see it.
In fact, Twitter is probably one of the only few left in the large social media space that actually gives you an 100% following network feed (minus maybe ads) in chronological order that REMEMBERS your selection (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok don't). Which makes this even more silly to say. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok do all have in-network exclusive chronological order feeds, BUT they are extremely hard to find, or don't remember your selection to them.
Hate of Twitter is easy to spoon out, but at least complain about things that aren't already solved for you.
Yes "Following" is what I use. The reason I use it is because of this algorithm that thinks I could possibly want 50% tweets that make me "engaged^H^H^H^H^Hraged". To me, that is a ridiculous mixture.
I'm happy they have a "Following" and I sure hope they keep it, but I will not be surprised if it goes away.
This is why I preferred the old For You tab - it was (mostly) the people I had chosen to follow, but meant that I had the best content show up whatever time of day I opened the app. This is particularly important when I'm in the UK and most of the people I follow are in the US, so they're not tweeting generally at the same time I'm on the app.
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.
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.
As long as they don’t try to tackle tweet quality at all separately from engagement twitter will remain unappealing to me.
This is a great thing.
You would need, at a minimum, a neutral third-party audit of Twitter's servers to conclude that the source code we see on GitHub is, in fact, the source code running Twitter. How often will they keep their GitHub repo in sync with their internal code, I wonder.
Presumably Twitter uses a version control system. But they scrubbed the history so that's also a point against their "transparency" claims. Without knowing the when and the why of changes you can't understand what you are looking at. People are pointing to that "author_is_elon" without knowing whether that was done before Elon bought Twitter or after.
But even then, git history can be faked.
> This is a great thing.
I disagree. It's the opposite. It provides the illusion of openness without the quality of openness, thus killing the debate once and for all.
But really, if people respond to Twitter's actions politically, that response exists within a context that was certainly influenced by Twitter's prior actions.
So let's wait and see...
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?
But if someone has hit the follow button 1,000+ times, it's reasonable to have some faith that they've seen a lot of tweets and know what they want. Showing a few out-of-network tweets seems reasonable (I got enough as it is through followings' retweets). But 50% of a feed that already can't fit tweets from thousands of followings just feels like shit.
The worst part is that the share of in-network tweets seems to be highly concentrated to the last 10 or so people I most recently interacted with, e.g. seeing the same user over and over just because I liked one of their tweets the other day. Which makes sense to save on computation costs, but it's pushed me into a much tighter bubble than I ever had when the timeline wasn't so out-of-network focused.
https://twitter.com/Ben_Cary_/status/1641893540614623258
> Twitter use to rank posts higher for those who had more followers/less people they follow
> They are removing that as of today but kinda interesting that someone with 10k/10k followers would get less reach than if they had 10k followers and only followed 6k > Twitter is also using the page rank algo that google created. Basically, if a lot of people interact with the user they create more authority in the system.https://twitter.com/modern_mindset/status/164207843202770534...
> Twitter algo is finally opensource.
> • Twitter Blue 2x boosts
> • Likes have 30x comment value
> • Links/mentions/names deboosts
> • Retweets have 20x comment value
> • Restrictions/suspensions deboost
> • Images/videos/trending topics 2x boost
> Will write a thread about it later. GM
> Twitter algo 101
> Boosts
> - Likes 30x
> - Retweets 20x
> - Twitter Blue 2-4x
> - Trusted circle 3x
> - Images/videos 2x
> - Replies 1x
> Negatives
> - URL only
> - No text
> - Mute
> - Block
> - Unfollow
> - Report > Part of twitter's algo Jack Dorsey, Katy Perry, Stephen Curry and Barack Obama as “testing accounts” for getting random Tweets for testingShe was unequivocally happy when I did, but perhaps it was just because of the gesture.
(EDIT: also, the rooster/horse/duck example of feedback loop would make for a terrific blog post)
It's probably more of a conservative/liberal identifier based on US political party ideals... And they likely would filter any metrics from this by the users country
I’m thinking along the lines of common word’s that have vastly different meanings depending on who’s saying it.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
We pretty much knew this is how all social media works, becuase a) engagement is what they want, why wouldn't they be optimizing for it, and b) how else might you measure 'quality'? Back when this started, I have no trouble believing some well-intentioned engineers thought that engagement was a good proxy for quality. A bunch of users give it the "like", isn't that a collective assessment of quality? Who is to say what quality is, overruling the users in aggregate?
I agree it has the negative effects you mention; and I've read lots of people writing about this, it's of course not a new observation.
But I agree it's good to have an explanation of what's going on, even when parts of are what we basically knew was happening on all social media networks. confirmed is better than "basically knew", for understanding how these things that effect our experiences (and our society) work.
Because selective disclosure is often propaganda. If a third party had chosen what the release or verified this is what's actually running in production, I would praise them.
Considering Elon's incessant lying, self-promotion, and manipulation, it's impossible to be complimentary of this at all. Everything he does is in bad faith.
Another trend Twitter popularized that I can't wait to die: absurdly large border-radiuses
It definitely isn't just metrics. Any algorithm change that negatively affected Musk was clearly not going live.
Separately, which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?
Who ? Musk is unique in being obsessed with being liked and relevant.
All of the other social CEOs including Porag and Jake have never really cared that much. And none of them participated in contributing content anything close to what Musk does.
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?
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...
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.
... did you see the source code? Blue checkmarks are weighted 4x as much as non-checkmarks. That's just one example of a major change that wouldn't have happened were it not for Elon
https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/15919691002257367...
> Interesting piece here. If you are following less than 500 and you are verified your reputation is 100. > The Twitter Algo uses graph of followers and tweet similarity to identify what alignment you are politicallyNitpick, but the PageRank algorithm was created before Google, because it was the foundation of it.
I’d like to see interesting tweets from a few hours ago, and not just Australian tweets when I’m up late at night.
I’m starting to think the broblem with Elon is mostly personal, he’s just a proxy and default wrong.
(not that I approve of his behaviors, but I can’t enjoy this whole mobbing that he’s getting; not that he cares this I’m not worried he’s getting traumatized in any way? it’s just how it’s become an identitarian trait for a certain group that irks me.)
I've definitely been hesitant to remove things I was pretty confident weren't used anymore, just because I didn't want to deal with the repercussions if I was wrong.
I’ve definitely been bitten by this. You always have to weigh the chance you break something against the upside. If you’re actually fixing a bug, fine. But just refactoring to make something cleaner? Or deleting because it seems like it’s not doing anything, even after doing some research? Think again.
Unless they mean actual public figure party members which are known and probably verified.
No.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
it starts dropping, klaxons start blaring, the room drops to red only lighting, engineers on the floor start pulling out their hair knowing the shitstorm that's coming
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
It turns out, according to the FBI (which is a conservative organization historically and exclusively run by conservatives), right wing extremism and violence is in fact the biggest domestic terror threat in the US, and it's currently growing [1]. FBI Director Wray gave this testimony after a right wing domestic terror attack was carried out that aimed to topple the US government. Not much has changed since then [2]. Since the former President's indictment the other day, the right-wing violent rhetoric has also ratcheted up a notch, so we can expect right-wing violence to follow.
Notably, we can confidently say this doesn't happen on the left, as when Hillary lost they did not launch an assault against the Capitol as the right did. Instead, they knit pink hats and had a march.
(PS before anyone whattabouts the George Floyd protests, the FBI doesn't see them the same way [3])
https://apnews.com/article/fbi-chris-wray-testify-capitol-ri...
https://news.yahoo.com/right-wing-extremists-responsible-for...
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/fbi-dhs-domestic-terrori...
Just now (as I am writing this comment) went to check on someone I saw an interview with the other day, and sure enough I am still following the person and they have been tweeting a few times a day, but I haven't been seeing any of it.
Other weird things are Twitter's habit of just preemptively muting people (I'll sometimes wonder why a person didn't reply and go back to reread a conversation, only to discover that they did reply; and conversely, people that I have muted or blocked showing up in my search results for a trending topic. Most of the people I manually mute are 'influencers' who use software, staff, or pure obsession to get in the first reply to politicians and the like, a behavior I find insufferably annoying even if I agree with their position.
I'm very interested in politics, but almost all my mutes/blocks are people of somewhat-similar political persuasion that Twitter assumes I would want to see, and insists on showing me despite my best efforts. I want to keep tabs on the arguments of people I strenuously disagree with, because I already know my own opinions and don't need validation. It's easier in some respects to maintain a second account with an uber-conservative persona and let the recommendation engine just feed it with more of the same.
- Lists as tabs
- _Heavily_ reduced spam
- Can look at Twitter without logging in
I'm likely missing some other obvious/uncontroversially good changes.
I still use Twitter and plan to continue using it. I am satisfied with most of his changes.
Twitter added this in 2019
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20880372/twitter-lists-al...
> - Can look at Twitter without logging in
All the recent change was show non-logged in users the Explore view which is... better than the previously mostly nothing I guess.
Again, you've always been able to view tweets and browse profiles if linked to directly before Elon.
You mean increased...
If you expand "see more tweets" sometimes there's normal tweets hiding down there and sometimes it's a bot trying to sell you guns.
Must be nice to have people hold you to such high standards though. A sign of respect in a way. No matter how strenuous the takes.
It's just about transparency or PR, take your pick.
Hm, there is lots of code released, I would think that some of it, can be run and might be forked and useful in other context, but mainly it is a PR move, sure.
"No doubt, many embarrassing issues will be discovered, but we will fix them fast!"
threadFeatures = tweet1 | tweet2 | tweet2
For example, I might see a some specific word or pattern of words in a tweet and quickly skip to the next one. That's very low friction but also a powerful signal. There are drawbacks (e.g. the long boring video that looks like something is about to happen but never does), but that's mitigated by combining this with other signals.
With 2, it's an explore/exploit trade-off. You try to explore as far and wide as you can while trying to avoid the things the user may dislike, all while sprinkling in just enough of the stuff that you know they'll like.
Yes, there are signals in human behavior that you can feed to your model. But no, it is never going to learn "on Mondays he works on his comics, so he'd prefer to see webcomic-related content" Don't sprinkle in your explore/exploit experiments. I know what I want, just let me decide based on what I'm in the mood for!
TikTok-style feeds are the absolute worst offender here, where they couldn't care less about what you think. They will serve you content, and you will either say "yes" or "no". So the only option for you as the user is to just wander through their content hyperspace. There's no structured way to jump between topics because everything lives in this formless content soup.
The other problem is that many social media platforms have you subscribe to the content streams of individuals directly. Individuals are high variance. How can you teach these engines that "I only care about this person's posts about pianos, not their terrarium hobby."
I pay a lot of attention to classes of things I don't want to see at all.
They just don't want to.
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 probability of it being added by the existing Twitter engineers and decreases the probability it was added due to Elon.
Obviously, these are rough numbers, but hopefully seeing any numbers at all helps you to get an intuition for the math.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-...
Or perhaps when a prediction didn't go according to plan, let us complain about another thing...
HNer's like you just make me laugh all the time with silly replies like that just being unable to cope.
Of course Elon banned those apps, so now I am on Mastodon where I see 100% of the content that I want. Bonus is that I can even follow many twitter users, through Mastodon bot mirrors. And of course, no ads.
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 by existing Twitter engineers. The odds of Musk being able to actually commit code to their repository are zero. Even if he had the permissions, the man simply does not have the technical acumen to make even a trivial change.)
I'll explain my mistake and why I made it.
I think I thought to use the estimate I did because Elon claimed he didn't know. The prior probability of not knowing something in a code base with millions of lines is very high, but contingent on his involvement in the change the prior that he is aware of it is much higher. So I started the estimate attempt with the probability that I thought better predicted the production of evidence claiming he didn't know.
Your point does raise my estimate substantially, but I think it probably raises it less than you would expect. I don't agree with your 1/300M prior, because I'm aware that hot users get special treatment. I've seen Elon's account thrown around in interview-style questions about hot users before and used as an example of a hot account that needs special treatment. This is something I've witnessed, but it wasn't contingent on Twitter being acquired and it happened prior to Twitter being acquired.
I also don't particularly assign high odds to wanting it, based on the evidence that he claimed to not want it implicitly by wanting it removed. I don't think it seems appropriate to get to near certain probability the he wanted it with the evidence being that he stated that he didn't want it. In my view there isn't a compelling reason for him to lie about this. He owns Twitter, so if he wanted them to have his account monitored that would be a reasonable thing well within his authority. If he wanted it, he doesn't need to pretend to not want it in order to appease someone.
It does seem to me that the odds that the change was added in response to someone thinking he wanted it is much higher than 1%.
Maybe it was a choice made many years ago that they thought was appropriate, but we can't yet know it's not used for other purposes. We can at least be reasonably sure they've added the author_is_elon within the past year. I would have thought there would be many more descriptors, or non-controversial descriptors.
Or maybe Elon specifically added those before releasing this code to get people riled up.
But if someone finds some code that suppresses recommendations from a specific political ideology across the board, that would be nefarious, IMO.
Musk expressed his disappointment with engineers' work and *told them to track* how many times his tweets get recommended, one worker told the outlet.
You seem weirdly protective of Elon fyi
So much has been concluded about him here without any evidence, instead grounding it in the premise that he’s rotten.
This is largely a false creation without evidence to back it up. People are assuming intention behind something that's much more easily explained as a bug, one that was quickly fixed. If it wasn't a bug, why would it disappear if people assume Elon is narcissistic as people claim? It'd still be prioritizing his tweets if it wasn't a bug.
He did notice it and it was treated as a 5 alarm fire, with a Musk cousin sending 2 am slack messages (on a Monday!) to Twitter engineers to urgently fix Elon's reach[1].
1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-...
But, we do have a bit of code that measures metrics on his account, so can we find the bit of code that increases the engagement on his account?
For very active accounts, I assume that's what the "vits" or "power user" one is for. Or, heck, "vits" might actually be what you said.
This seems to be unsubstantiated. Are you really claiming that selective disclosure is always superior to complete lack of transparency?
Are you claiming total ignorance is superior to partial revelation? I think we would all do ourselves better to go live on a desert island and abandon everything about modern life. A shovel might be useful to bury our heads while we're there.
I am claiming that this is at least sometimes true, yes. Not always, but sometimes.
You're the one claiming that partial revelation is always, without exception, superior to total ignorance. That seems unlikely. Propoganda is often partial revelation, are you saying it is always better to receive only propoganda than to receive no information at all?
Like if I tell you that your boyfriend has been having secret meetings with some woman you don't know, with full knowledge that the secret meetings are because she's a photographer and he's planning to propose, have I improved things by disclosing the information to you in that manner? Were my actions a "net positive"?
Can't say I'm shocked overall, but it's strange to see it so 'on the nose'
Sounds toxic to me
They wanted to answer the questions of "is twitter biased against Republicans" so they measured it, turns out they favored republicans.
None of this will matter though, because the complaints are made in bad faith.[2][3]
You may say this is biased comment, but I’m not going to engage in false equivalences, when the outrage and results of the outrage aren’t symmetrical. Cite one story where a major social network (Twitter, Facebook, Google News, YouTube, etc) publicly came out and said that they were adjusting their algorithms to make it more lefty. I’ll wait. This bad faith of the complaints are particularly obvious when the most popular and influential right wing television channel, Fox News, has been caught red handed knowingly spreading conspiracy theories for ratings.[6]
[0] "Associated Press is the least biased according to both Democrats and Republicans." https://www.businessinsider.com/most-biased-news-outlets-in-...
[1] "The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gateway_Pundit
[2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-22-mn-26779-...
[3] "Internal report finds ‘virtually identical’ rates of conservative and liberal topics, but guidelines updated to ‘exclude possibility of improper actions’" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/24/facebook-...
[4] "There is some strategy to it [bashing the ‘liberal’ media]. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one." -- Rich Bond, 1992 Republican Party Chairman https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-working...
[5] “InfoWars is an American far-right conspiracy theory and fake news website owned by Alex Jones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoWars
[6] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/all-the-texts-fox-ne...
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
In fact, in just over a year from the publication of that blog post, Twitter -- as a matter of official company policy -- would be promoting the unfounded belief that Twitter engineers and scientists were actively engaging in a propaganda campaign against conservatives.
The exact opposite reaction of what I'm looking for.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using...
I remember everyone agreeing with the Twitter engineer who said maybe his content wasn't interesting enough, while to me that seemed odd. If people follow an account and they tweet and they're online they should have a high chance of seeing that tweet. That's the entire point of following someone. If someone I've followed tweets something I would like to see it.
I am trying to figure out how the algorithm decides on what to show in the Following tab, but the code is way too big to analyze without being able to run it and look at logging/metrics/stats.
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.
Obviously the end result is similarly that musk's visibility can never decrease, but it's a more technical (and to the letter) compliance with the specifications.
Feel free to give me a source for that, but I'm pretty sure that's not true.
As far as I can tell, he did not instruct Twitter employees to make his Tweets appear to all users, but he did want them to make his posts appear in timelines significantly more often. This lead to reports of users suddenly getting their timelines flooded with lots of his Tweets.
It seems like there was a rush within Twitter to raise Musk’s engagement numbers by altering the recommendation algorithm to specifically boost posts from his accounts. The special boost factor was later reduced, but allegedly still exists.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
Efficiency is way more of a concern, at this scale, than the more trivial was of trying to find a competent person that wouldn't misuse the values.
If they think that the length of time I spend on a post is 100% correlated with the amount that I want to see it, they really don't understand people at all. It's an embarrassingly shallow model of how how humans behave.
It's a trade off. Viewing rates give back feedback 100% of the time. Asking users for a thumbs up or down gives feedback almost none of the time, and still might not be accurate.
How is that a nitpick? They're diametrically opposite results.
In my opinion if you really care about this topic the right thing to do is ask someone at Twitter when the change was made. Getting more information would make us converge on the true estimate faster than arguing the odds IMO. Feel free to update me with the results if you do end up doing that so I can adjust my beliefs accordingly. I'm not going to try to gain this information, because I don't think the question matters much.
That's absolutely fair, and 1/300M was a reductio ad absurdum rather than a serious proposal. Not all users are equal, just like not all lines of code are equal :)
I have a few issues with the "hot user" theory, but they all boil down to the same point: no matter what the use case, you'd never want to do this with a single static user.
Does your infra require special-casing for accounts with more than 100M followers? That should be a flag in the account properties that gets flipped manually or automatically: if these users cause infra problems, you really don't want to be making code changes + full rollouts whenever a new user becomes hot.
Is this just a guard-rail metric, to make sure there's not some bug specifically affecting hot users that tanks their engagement? You'd want a much larger static set than a single account just to ensure there's a large enough number/variety of tweets to compute metrics from. A single user might take a break for a week, or might only be posting very specific kind of content for an extended period of time.
In any case, even if you chose to do this with a single user rather than a set of users, why would Musk be the obvious single choice? He wasn't the most followed Twitter account until two days ago. A year ago there must have been at least a couple of dozen accounts roughly as notable as Musk. The odds of him having been chosen as the special case still would not be very high.
> In my view there isn't a compelling reason for him to lie about this.
The reason to lie about this is that it makes him appear weak, needy, and a target of even more mockery. Given the purchase of Twitter seems to have been a vanity project, having this be exposed and leaving it in goes directly against his apparent goal.
I think it only makes sense to think like you are if you've adopted equilibrium assumptions; if you haven't then I find this sort of reasoning to be a conjunction fallacy causing an epistemic closure.
(YouTube completely changed their comments algorithms in the last few years and it's much better now, so you probably just didn't notice that.)
If Green Cards quotas suddenly became available how many would stay?
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/twitter-business-month...
and of course all this means is that the organizations most likely to be able to afford it won't have to
The smart move would be silent on the policy change, pay, and support rival platforms as they can. Instead they will eventually pay and look like they lost.
The top 10,000 are getting exemptions and won't have to pay
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/twitter-business-month...
It's wild hubris for twitter to try to invoice/penalize the very users and organizations that make twitter anything but insolvent. There should be money exchanged here, but it should be flowing generously and most importantly in the other direction.
I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."
(Note that I use discriminate in the literal sense, as a simple statement of fact.)
Also, how did you get a blue check before being able to buy one?
Ah, I didn't know that; then it's merely the second most boring, mundane way I would expect.
My statement above was to read ’we’ as in as the tech community not ‘we’ Twitter staff; others have quoted some of the sources on this thread, but it was definitively reported by a few different outlets at the time.
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.
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 lot of meetings, scope creep, etc. - and as far as that goes it's not easy anyway, since it's highly technical and implementation-specific yet also a management/policy decision to make.
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.
If your play was "it's some source code, hence people will think we are open, and that should be really good for us", that would make you a very special kind of idiot in this space.
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 recommendation/moderation, that it is only because that group disproportionately participates in behavior that is bad for the platform. That isn't a problem. It would actually be worse for the platform overall if you did anything to appease that group.
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.
And if we accept hat Twitter believes (or more accurately did believe) that misgendering people is wrong, who cares whether people who want to do it feel an injustice is being done? Would anyone say that deleting spam is an injustice to spammers? You break the rules and you get punished.
There’s benefit of the doubt then there’s just… whatever the polar opposite of that is.
Propaganda can be a pretty vague term by the way. Can you describe how the public coming to a better understanding of the inner workings of the worlds most influential social media site is merely propaganda?
Of course, but this requires the propaganda be contextualized, which wasn't a part of the situation I was suggesting.
> Can you describe how the public coming to a better understanding of the inner workings of the worlds most influential social media site is merely propaganda?
You're begging the question.
Does Twitters disclosure of parts of the algorithm used (but certainly not all!) actually lead to a better understanding of the inner workings of Twitter? Or is such a release actually serving some purpose beyond transparency?
If we had that, I'd agree it would be good. But I'm not convinced we do.
Elon's done the exact same thing before at Twitter with his selective disclosure of material to friendly journalists in the "Twitter files". That, in my opinion, led to an overall worse understanding of Twitter's actions, not better.
>But I'm not convinced we do.
That would likely be because, as mentioned previously there is still more to come out; it's not possible to be reasonably convinced yet. Going back to the original question:
>>What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives?
…so he's now not charging people who can pay, while charging people less able to pay.
Though, the main problem is that Twitter is about as big in Japan as it is in the US, but Elon only thinks about US culture wars because his only friends are a few VCs and a retired postal worker crank named catturd2. So none of his new ideas are going to work there.
> the main problem is that Twitter is about as big in Japan as it is in the US
It’s not even close. When you account for the value of ad impressions, the US market is worth about 3.5x its next biggest market (Japan), and it drops off very sharply after that. You can argue that Twitter’s policies should be less US-centric. But the reason they are that way in the first place is because the US market is their most valuable market by a long shot.
Reading between the lines, Musk sounds like a giant baby.
There doesn't need to be. When they run AB tests, it's possible that they'd pick the winning cell if it makes the Elon metrics look better.
Even if the algorithm doesn't do anything explicit about boosting him, it can be tweaked through AB testing to favor him.
And apparently it works, considering those flags
I’m sure your simping for Elon is highly appreciated. Maybe he’ll let you taste his boots next.
However, if you believe that it was to be used as part of a system for increasing engagement, then you are asserting that it is a system with no control groups, which is a stupid mistake that wouldn’t be made by an undergraduate taking their first statistics class. They wouldn’t make that mistake even on the first day of that class, because they took a class in statistics in high school!
(No).
This is a meta-level bias!
It is very much likely to be the CEO a company wanting to understand his companies product.
Didn't this just reveal that they're A/B testing on Musk's tweet performance? At the very least they're avoiding regressions, and I guess any incidental improvements to it won't be reversed, so isn't it fundamentally the same? Unless we're taking the word "everyone" literally, I guess.
he is isn't a CEO, he is a whining baby
Ah so he makes jokes, and is well known enough to need security precautions. This makes him “a whiny baby”. Solid argument.
Sounds like fairly rational behaviour.
HN isn’t a site for making unfounded personal attacks on others.
After some digging in the code base it turned out that there was a de-boosting factor based on the absolute numbers of blocks your account had, which affected popular and controversial accounts (like Elon’s) unfairly.
This investigation was initiated by Musk but it resulted in a great improvement in the algorithm with no special treatment for his account.
Elon's happy, the engineers he turned to kept jobs and any time I find myself in the "For You" tab I see Elon's memes and his @catturd2 RTs.
> By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
> Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told.
It seems indisputable that Musk’s account gets special treatment, even if some of the changes may also boost other controversial users.
You did not reference any sources, while the article claims sources inside Twitter gave them this information.
Anonymous Twitter sources have zero credibility since a good portion of the employees still want to oust Elon.
No, you can tell who he cares about because he replies to them, and because his emails were released in discovery from the earlier Twitter lawsuit and it turned out his friends put him up to it because they were mad the Babylon Bee got banned for a US culture war pronouns joke.
I certainly don't have to expect he'll make good decisions, since he has no experience with the business, is a completely atypical user, was forced to buy it in the first place, and has lost $20 billion so far by his own valuation. (May have lost a few millions more by firing that disabled Icelandic acquihire in violation of his contract and a few discrimination laws.)
The network effect is very very strong though. Even if someone makes a good competitor (Instagram is prototyping one apparently) I'd be surprised if bad decisions actually killed it.
> When you account for the value of ad impressions, the US market is worth about 3.5x its next biggest market (Japan), and it drops off very sharply after that.
I suggest reverse adjusting for how poor their ad targeting is. I've used it both places; the ads are actually good and relevant in Japan (…except for being for domestic apps, so not valid for tourists) but in the US they've always been nonsense. eg if you follow any doctors it will just assume you're also one and burn the budget of every medical ad it's got showing them to you.
There's nothing, that's what the point of this thread/argument is. The portion that Twitter has opened (or even simply committed to opening) is not remotely enough to hold them accountable.
The code they've released here is less helpful than a single Helm chart.
>>>What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives?
Because this is useless, and worse yet, it's pointless and blatant virtue signalling. I stood up in defense of Musk's private bid for Twitter, but there's nothing worth licking his boot over here. The suits don't care. The Open Source community gains nothing. The users will never see, interact with or modify the recommendation code. Nobody will be able to meaningfully audit anything until Musk stops selectively burning the books at Twitter HQ.
If Elon wants Twitter, he has the money to go get it. If he wants my respect, he's got to do an awful lot more than making "the algorithm" public. This release is so pathetic that it's probably colored my opinion of Musk more than any of the opinion rags I've seen yet.
> Assuming by default everyone but you is a naïve doe lost in a forest and therefore lacks the intellect to contextualize anything for themselves is undemocratic.
Luckily not a claim I'm making. It's better for conversation if you reply to what I say, not misrepresentations thereof.
> Going back to the original question:
And I replied to it already, but I'll reiterate: I don't believe this change "can only" be a net positive, what makes you believe that is the case?
From that viewpoint, it does make some sense to use his account as measurement point.
> even if it's hard for you to believe.
It's not hard for me to believe at all.
(Speaking about Twitter the product, not necessarily Twitter the company.)
Twitter the multi-billion dollar advertising company needs the big whales. I think it was pretty clear the company was under discussion.
Are you looking to build public trust in you and your organization? Then dumping a bunch of code with no context isn't going to help much, as it's not code but behavior that builds or destroys trust.
Are you looking to lean into a polarized partisan environment, pushing a narrative where its you and your supporters against an unfair group of "others"? Then a big splashy move high on symbolism and low on substance that will inspire lots of high profile, divisive media coverage is a great way to go.
And far more important things than worrying whether said tweets are popular or not.
If the general public cares about the CEO’s tweets, then necessarily there will be a danger that the death of the CEO will ignite a crisis in the general public; e.g. Steve Jobs at Apple.
The producer is not the star.
I never suggested the CEO needs to be the star tweeter. What I am saying is that the CEO needs to be a tweeter, i.e. personally invested in his/her company's product. Companies with CEOs who don't give a shit about about their product/users tend not last long as "immortal entities".
Oh and I forgot, he also helps ukranians vs the Russians. Not a good idea if you want a risk free life.
Maybe after every update to the model, they check these stats to ensure that they haven't biased towards Elon Musk, and if so roll the change back.
Likewise, if Twitter actioned people for saying "kill all men" or "all cops are bastards", this would be seen as having an obvious partisan impact.
The handling of trans issues is just one example to illustrate the problem here. People on the left think trans rights are human rights while people on the right think a lot of trans issues should be open for discussion, legislation, persecution, etc. I think if we're being intellectually honest most would acknowledge that as a country we are far from consensus on many of the details here (bathrooms, girls sports, etc), and yet Twitter's rules and enforcement actions behaved as if the leftist view of transgender people is the only valid and permissible view.
The handling of January 6 and the banning of Trump is another example.
These things are Rorschach tests; people apply their biases and reach very different conclusions about what should be done. I don't claim to know the solution, I'm just trying to sketch out the problem with the way things were creating a climate where a big segment of the US felt unwelcome and resentful toward the platform.
This presents a problem for the platform, since you can't afford to alienate large double digit percents of the population if your mandate from shareholders is to grow mDAU by any means necessary. In that context, having some metrics tracking in place to measure the impact of algorithm changes on democrats and republicans to see whether impact is disproportionate is a completely rational thing to do.
I see your point about losing users potentially but I would argue that Twitter’s intense focus on the US (as shown by the democrat/republican metrics) and trying to placate everyone is actually a negative for their business. There’s billions of other internet users outside the US. Shifting focus to serve them instead of focussing intensely on trying to please both sides in the US (and failing) would probably deliver better value for their shareholders.
It can be if the thing they're asking for is perceived to be untrue and the person being asked is a big stickler for that sort of thing. If you'll excuse me using metaphors on this sensitive topic: if someone wants to be referred to as "His Majesty" but is not actually the king then while many nice people will indulge him[1], some who care a great deal about the "correct" usage of noble titles won't.
[1] And it'll work out well! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton
No, it is about what Twitter believes. That was what I was referring to with point 2 in my original comment. Not every customer complaint is valid. It is ok to hear a complaint and dismiss it without further investigation. Twitter doesn't have some obligation to get all of society to think its rules are fair.
It is fine for a company to tell some potential customers to "fuck off" as long as that company isn't discriminating against a protected class. Twitter isn't discriminating against a protected class here.
If Twitter thinks misgendering people is wrong, it is impossible to come to an agreement with a group that think properly gendering people is wrong without Twitter compromising its own morals. Twitter is allowed to stick to its own morals and tell the people who disagree to "fuck off".
Twitter has changed in that regard since Musk took over. You can pretty much say what you like on trans issues now, as long as it doesn't break other rules. Loads of gender critical feminists have had their accounts restored in the past few months - usually having been suspended for 'misgendering' or some such nonsense.
Would it surprise you to find out that this resentment is in fact, conveniently manufactured, politically useful outrage? Because it's simply not true on its face, and the only thing we need to know to understand this is to see that it took Trump launching a coup to be banned on the platform. He violated the TOS every day, and he was allowed to spread his message to his millions of followers by Twitter. You want to talk about unfairly elevating political opinions? Trump used the platform to violate citizens' first amendment rights, and we had to take him to court to get those rights back. Twitter didn't do shit to protect us from him.
But it's not just Trump. It's right wing political opinions writ large. Far and away from sinking right wing conservative voices, Twitter research found they actually amplify right wing voices in every one of their top 6 countries except Germany [1]. Yes, that includes the US.
Is your mind blown? Have you heard of this once? I bet all you've heard from Musk and right wing politicians is that Twitter is going hard on conservatives and deplatforming them. Blocking their messages. Being unfair to conservatives and right wing opinions.
Yet what has actually happened? Twitter was actually deferential to conservative voices! It boosted conservatives and right wing voices at the expense of liberals. How did this happen? This is conservative messaging 101: complain about bias loudly enough and the other side will go so far out of their way to seem unbiased, they will be biased in the other direction. Conservatives managed to complain so loud about Twitter being biased against them that you not only believe it, but reality is actually completely the opposite.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
Of course, the man is essentially a walking “old man yells at clouds” meme at this point, so I’m not sure you should take anything he says with any merit.
If one of the defining characteristics of a political/religious/cultural group is having a particular ethical view, then enforcing a contrary ethical view against them is disadvantaging them and discriminating against them. Now, it may in some cases be morally and/or legally permissible, or even justifiable, discrimination, but it still is discrimination, and it is still disadvantaging them.
> Would anyone say that deleting spam is an injustice to spammers? You break the rules and you get punished.
Worldwide, many jurisdictions have laws against discrimination on the basis of religion; although it is less common, some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief. A law prohibiting discrimination on some ground, is evidence that some people believe discrimination on that ground to be immoral. By contrast, I've never heard anyone suggest that spammers should constitute a "protected class", and I'm not aware of any jurisdiction which treats them as one.
Some people believe that there is nothing morally wrong with discrimination on the basis of religion and/or politics. Other people think there is something morally wrong with it, but if there is a conflict between the right to be free from religious and/or political discrimination, and the rights of LGBT people, the rights of the latter morally ought to take priority. Spam is irrelevant to that ethical debate.
I don't think misgendering people is a "defining characteristic" of Republicans and if that is, the Republican Party is in a pretty sad state considering all the bigger problems in the world. And if that qualifies as a "defining characteristic", there are plenty of other counter examples of society accepting discrimination as you define it. Banning polygamy would be discriminatory against Mormons is one. You could even argue that a full abortion ban is discriminatory against Jewish people.
>some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief.
Notably not in the US where Twitter is based and were most of these complaints originate.
Some religious conservatives are convinced that referring to a transgender person by their preferred pronoun is a sin, even a serious one, for which they will be judged by God. Even religious conservatives who don't personally subscribe to that viewpoint, see it as one they are morally obliged to respect and defend. [0] While that doesn't describe all Republicans, obviously there is a significant overlap between Republicans and religious conservatives. And for a devout religious person, their religious beliefs are one of their defining characteristics–they are a huge part of their life, even their very identity, who they understand themselves to be.
Even those conservatives who think it is okay to use a person's preferred pronouns, will adopt a much more restricted stance on the topic than many trans activists. Many will insist on it must be voluntary rather than mandatory, and defend the freedom of conscience of those who take a more conservative stance than they do – which is an expression of both religious and political beliefs about respect for individual freedom and conscience.
Some conservatives are willing to use a friend/colleague/acquaintance's preferred pronouns when interacting with them, but will refuse to do the same for a criminal in the news. Look at Wikipedia to see people who vehemently insist that you must use the preferred pronouns of a dead school shooter or executed murderer – and even if the family of the victims publicly objected to it, that wouldn't change their mind.
> Banning polygamy would be discriminatory against Mormons is one. You could even argue that a full abortion ban is discriminatory against Jewish people.
Prohibitions on discrimination are never absolute, they always permit exceptions – so the existence of exceptions is not an argument against the existence of the prohibition. And whatever the merits of those specific examples, they are actions, not speech. Society traditionally gives religious minorities far greater latitude with respect to their beliefs about what they can and can't say, than their beliefs about actions which aren't predominantly expressive in character. Jehovah's Witnesses who believe it is a sin to salute flags or recite pledges of allegiance, Quakers who believe it is a sin to swear oaths, etc.
> >some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief.
> Notably not in the US where Twitter is based and were most of these complaints originate.
While the US currently lacks federal laws banning political discrimination, state and local laws sometimes do ban it, see [1]. Some of those laws are specific to certain contexts (e.g. housing or employment), and so may not be applicable to a social media platform such as Twitter. However, given increasing concern among conservatives about political discrimination, it seems rather likely that we'll see more state laws enacted on that topic in the future.
[0] Examples: https://www.gotquestions.org/transgender-pronouns.html https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/stand-fast-on-the-pr... https://seekersguidance.org/answers/modesty/should-i-honour-...
[1] https://reason.com/volokh/2021/10/18/bans-on-political-discr...
But no, please, go off on your tangent that is not at all centered in reality.
Such a system, which certainly exists, was also made extremely quickly. We all know the timeline. We all have seen the rants and then the immediate effect of manual changes made to please the rants. I could easily see control groups going out the window when your boss expects their tweets to be prioritized yesterday.
I also like how confident you are in a company’s ability after they explicitly laid off and fired the majority of its staff. Generally speaking, when that happens, people lose confidence rather than gain it, but here you are proving us all of wrong. Gold star for you, maybe you’ll even get the other boot now!
I’m sure it feels so rewarding to simp for a man who will never even look in your general direction, let alone talk to you or know all the great things you said about him and his companies.
I mean, considering you didn't even know what the title of the "previous owner" even was, you seem to do that a lot.
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 easier to define. No one can honestly define "independent" except in a kind of "none of the above" sense, since they can range anywhere from extreme right, to the center, to the extreme left.
Observing and measuring leads to understanding. As others here have noted, sometimes you want to measure to ensure that you're not inadvertently affecting an outcome or phenomenon.
I think as this repo shows it's conciously, rather than unconsciously, getting preferential treatment.
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!).
They classify me as:
* speaks Indonesian
Interested in:
* Beer
* Cricket
* DJs
* Dance
* Enterprise software
* Horror
* NFL football
* South America
And aged either between 13-54 or (and?) over 65
On that basis, they'd probably call me a Republican.
Carries a different meaning when you're British, that name does.
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.
https://gizmodo.com/twitter-algorithm-aoc-ben-shapiro-cattur...
Changing this requires states to adopt alternative systems, which can sometimes mean amending state constitutions. It isn't easy or straightforward, and the general sense is that there are better things to spend that effort on.
You tell me if 90% is a "vast" majority or not. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...
In my personal experience, software engineers, when you ask them about technical matters like "does the code do X" or "is there a condition for Y" are generally pretty honest. Programming is a task that requires being able to have structured and literal reasoning, and asking engineers about purely technical details usually triggers that response, even if you can imagine a social motive for lying.
Elon is furthermore a software engineer (he wrote ALOT of code at zip2 & paypal) so your argument falls flat in that regard.
LOL they are desperate for reach. Incredibly so; have you not listen to any podcast by them? They are begging people to go to their site. They get a fraction of the organic traffic they used to and nearly everything is driven from other site like Twitter, Google News, Facebook, etc. The internet age has not been kind to classic news orgs.
That's on the strength of having a lot of verticals like games, recipes and Wirecutter though.
Then why are they on Twitter?
I don’t know why you think I’d like Tucker Carlson or why Tucker being sensational would make Verge and Vice not clickbait.
I try to avoid both, when I can. :)
You compare scientists with businesses. One of them's job and passion is to collect knowledge for the sake of knowledge. For the other one it would be cost without gain and eliminated if they didn't do anything with it!
No idea what journalists are doing in that list, what do they measure? If they want something measured they'd ask or look at other's services. Unless you mean the business that the journalists work for, but hen it's just that, a business.
Businesses also rely on astronomy and geology, in instances. The former is used for navigation (though far less than in the past, I'll grant), and there are certain extractive sectors with interests in geology. Risk-management as well (insurance and catastrophic risk, whether from landslides, earthquakes, volcanos, tsunami, or other phenomena).
You'll also find businesses keeping tabs on weather, climate, competition (competitive intelligence), demographic data, politics, legal cases, laws, social and cultural movements, etc., etc., etc., which in many cases they have comparatively little capacity to change directly.
You're also jumping late into a thread which has already given numerous other rationales for why such activities might be undertaken.
Sometimes approaching a discussion from the PoV of seeing what you can learn from it rather than automatically adopting a presumptive stance of opposition or disagreement affords benefits. I recommend it strongly.
Awwww. Too bad for them.
Please don't empathize with me, though. I don't need it :0
The vast vast vast vast majority of people use “American” social network because they are the social networks that exist. The US is undeniably the main exporter of SaaS products. See: the incumbents freaking out that China is getting a turn in the front seat. I’ve never once heard of anyone seeking ‘American tech’, except for some punchline in an anti-Soviet joke or movie.
Foreign nationals can comment about American politics because the US doesn’t have jurisdiction over their speech, notwithstanding the back and forth over whether social media companies are liable for disseminating such content in the first place.
A material part of why the USA is seen as The Country in Western culture, and a noted big player in other cultures, is because of the power it projects via the media. That includes both Hollywood exports, and social media.
Really? Why is everyone using MacBooks and iPhones? Actually most Soviet computers were copies of western designs. [0]
> is because of the power it projects via the media. That includes both Hollywood exports, and social media.
The thing is, is takes to to project, someone has to export a product and someone else has to import it. Since people seek it and want to consume it it's easy to export.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_computer_system...
One reason people have a distorted idea of what physical products the US produces, so I've read, is that most of them are products for industrial use, in factories and so on.
You look at consumer products that are made in..., because that's where the finishing touches are put on. That's not representative of the global economy though.
Of all the people you can hate on in the world, hating on Elon is to me very odd. Tall poppy syndrome I guess...
This isn't Tall Poppy syndrome. This is Sideshow Bob repeatedly walking into rakes and getting smacked in the face.
By the way, I’m not excusing his behavior by saying this, but I’m pretty sure the irreverence is a complete response to the struggles and pain from non-stop attacks from fighting giants in the arena for years. Putting yourself out there, living in the arena, especially to the extent he has, is super hard. Most of us don’t have the courage. If you do, you’re welcome to enter it and try to be a better role model. The world needs it.
I'm not convinced it's quite that simple.
For example, Canada also has a first-past-the-post electoral system - yet political parties here have come and gone. And continue to do so.
For example in the UK, the Tories ("Conservative and Unionist Party") and Labour are currently the biggest parties, but a hundred years ago this was a novel situation, Labour were seen as a third party, while the Liberal party (which was eventually absorbed into what is today "Liberal Democrats") had seen success over decades and were often in government prior to that point.
The US parties are just coalitions of disparate interests joining together until they (maybe) represent enough people to have a majority and be able to enact their collective interests.
> the insidious Québécois plots to annex Prince Edward Island
I know it's a joke, but the people of Prince Edward Island would most likely welcome it. Economically that would be a huge boost. Not sure Québec would enjoy it however.
Perhaps they should look at annexing Labrador?
This was needed because the convoy of morons was seriously damaging people's quality of life and the local police did not do their job. The police in other towns DID do their job and blocked the trucks. You should be mad at the cops who just sat by and watched the convoy of morons roll in with their thumbs up their butt.
For example, during the occupation of residential areas of the capital they created deafening noise around the clock that was measured indoors (windows closed) at levels causing permanent hearing damage after minutes of exposure, with police doing nothing to stop them.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/banks-were-only-asked-t...
And it doesn't even have to be such a crass example. What if a person is legally called Robert, but he's gone by Bob his whole life - is the stickler right if they insist on calling them by their legally given name?
I actually think that if someone genuinely thinks someone else is a pissface then it's their right to call the other person that. I also think that excluding such a person from your conversations may be sensible. This applies to pronouns too.
In your comment, you said that we can just block the n-word. Why? Should it not also be up to the users offended by it to block those using it? I don't think people using the word should be on the platform, but I don't know where you'd draw the line.
> So you can't just create a rule that blocks everyone who says "He" just like you can block the n-word.
I don't think I've ever seen a single person suggest this.
> The problem is with the person assuming every single person in the general public should treat them as a friend and getting offended when a label that is applied to half of the population (neither as a positive or negative, merely as a descriptor) is somehow that bad of a thing.
I'm not sure what situation you're presenting here. Trans persons usually don't assume that the general public should treat them as a friend. What they assume is that "if I tell somebody I would like to be referred to with female pronouns they should do so" is a very normal thing to ask of somebody. I'm male, but if somebody erroneously called me female, I'd correct them. If they kept calling me female, I'd try to get them removed from the social situation I'm in. Why is this any different for a trans person?
> (neither as a positive or negative, merely as a descriptor)
This is a pretty bad line of argumentation. For racist people, the n-word is also just a descriptor, and they don't understand why they're not allowed to use it.
In the end, referring to somebody in a way they don't like is always a demonstration of power. By doing so, you're saying "it is okay for me to make you feel less welcome, because I won't suffer negative consequences from doing so". The only harm in making people feel accepted is an imaginary one.
I'm struggling to think of a reason why this is anything but bad faith nonsense.
the only thing that saved us was cooler heads that prevailed on both sides.
And all that discussion so that they can spend $72k annually with Twitter, a y/o/y increase of $72k from last year. With no guarantees of reach, because the whole paid-only verification thing is an experiment that began an hour ago. Let me just say that this whole pitch is going to be...difficult... at the point in the economic cycle where we find ourselves.
Facebook did they same thing btw, just more gradual. For years they changed the algorithm slowly to take away reach from Pages only to offer it back as long as you paid.
If that's a fair comparison – society's future isn't looking bright.
Don't be surprised if Hitler doesn't empathize with you either, you have only yourself to blame!
Ironically, America has one of the most open political systems. You register as one party or the other and vote in primaries. This has lead to a huge variety of people replacing hated mainstream politicians. That's way more than you can say for many other countries.
It absolutely produces different outcomes than a two party system. Smaller parties make demands as a condition for joining any coalition (or similar arrangement). For example, Canada's NDP only agreed to back the Liberal Government on condition of state funded dental care for children being implemented. Now it is. Millions are affected. Whether you agree with it or not - that is unquestionably a "meaningfully different outcome". Other examples abound if you care to look.
>I'm not aware of any parliamentary system with a wonderful diversity of thought and a long record of positive accomplishments.
That's an impossibly high bar. The standard we're talking about is whether it's better than a two party system.
You think logrolling doesn't happen in the American system? Parties are made up of factions who will entertain each other's preferred priorities, which is the exact same thing you're describing except that the parties of the various factions are nominally the same. There's no real natural or obvious philosophical reason why your position on gun ownership should imply a position on environmental regulation, religion, infrastructure buildings, racial politics, abortion, tax policy, and more. We're so used to the groupings that they seem natural but if we go back and looking at older American party systems you'll see parties that don't 100% map onto the contemporary ones, with a blend of some elements we would think of as fitting and others we wouldn't.
Anecdotally, a recurring theme in conversations I've had while living abroad is the desire to prune or consolidate some parties.
While both sides in the US have big tents, they are effective in whipping votes when things need to get done.
It also helps that detracting coalition partners can't torpedo their leadership. Historically, factions within a party, like Blue dog dems or Tea partiers, had to wait for an election to litigate their grievances.
Compared to India, Japan, Singapore and (depending on the metric) China, the US looks clearly left of center. Compared to most of the Middle East, the US looks extremely left-wing.
[0] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/elon-musk-offering-to-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anheuser-Busch#Acquisition_by_...
It would have been reasonable if he had performed due diligence and came to that conclusion, but he explicitly chose to waive due diligence, and then tried to renege anyway.
I also think many of the changes to make Twitter more open, such as now open sourcing the recommendation algorithm, publishing view counts (which indirectly makes it clear when something or somebody has been shadow banned), and more are all big steps forward in creating a much better and open service for all. Really most of every change he's pursued since taking over Twitter, from my perspective at least, seems to have been big steps forward.
What would you say has been irrational?
Really? You can't even think of one single thing?
Elon does not need you going around personally trying to shut down other people's discussion. That's cult like behavior.
How are the people that disagree with you in this thread trying to shut down your discussion?
b) Nothing I have said is untrue.
c) This is not a normal way of measuring the health of a business. Standard metrics include EBITDA, DAU, MAU, LTV, CAC etc.
d) This is not normal behaviour from a CEO. You don't see Mark Zuckerberg, Shou Zi Chew, Evan Spiegel etc using their products the same way Elon does.
Would I do things differently if it were up to me? Sure, but it isn’t, and I can at least appreciate that they are trying to move quickly & try different things. I’m reserving my judgement for whether or not this approach works in the long run.
The problem is Musk is learning the hard way when taking something over is that the old crew is never as dumb as he hoped they were, and he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.
The normal ways of measuring the business, namely EBIDITA, DAU, MAU .., worked. They reliably reported the state of the business. Elon Musk was the only person in the financial market who looked at those measures and interpreted them as meaning “add US$1B annual debt service.”
I think the main difference between my faction and the main trans activist faction is we don't think honest misgendering (done due to an earnestly held belief about the sex of the other person and some moral convictions against white lies) should be a firing offense.
This seems counter to what you wrote earlier:
> I also think that excluding such a person from your conversations may be sensible.
Let's say your a customer of a company, and an employee "honestly misgenders you", even after you've repeatedly asked them not to. What can the company and you do to exclude them from your conversations, without firing them?
Should a company also accept a racist employee calling customers the n-word? Is it acceptable to fire somebody for that?
Well said. I know someone who is a vegetarian and their old boss always referred to them as vegan. Seems minor because neither word is offensive, but after correcting the boss multiple times, she realized it was just him asserting his power. A prick thing to do.
The main difference is that the person calling you female likely doesn't have an honest belief that you are female, they're just trying to be a dick.
It just fueled apathy for me: there's only so much research one can do with limited press coverage and personal time constraints. Shrug.
I wouldn't call that a "routine" matter.
Or, they can turn around and try to impose negative consequences on the people who are trying to impose negative consequences on them. Which, one might argue, is exactly what is happening in several state legislatures in the US right now. And then the fight goes on until one side wins, or there is some sort of "peace deal".
But I wouldn't frame it as cause-and-effect like that: one side doesn't attack the other as a response to experiencing consequences; they attack the other pervasively at every opportunity, and sometimes experience consequences for doing so.
Here in the UK there are environmental protestors gluing themselves to the streets and I have quite mixed feelings about them.
A protest that does not inconvenience anyone is very easy to ignore.
It's unquestionably a different dynamic. If the party is in power, then the party is in power. Period. They have less incentive to listen to smaller factions. Do they? I sure hope so. But it's not the same.
Furthermore, these internal deals are more likely to be kept private since theres no benefit to airing everything to the press, the public and the opposition.
In a multi-party system almost all those deals are public. Thus, voters can decide if everyone lived up to their promise.
In the field International Relations, there's lots of discussion around the stability (or instability) of a bipolar distribution of power. Your stance is closer to neorealists, mine is maybe closer to classical realists. Have fun reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_(international_relati... and related links
But from a game theory perspective, having only two powers turns everything into a zero-sum game. I argue that leads to less cooperation and increased divisiveness. Not agreeing with Republicans means you must be a Democrat in their eyes. This "us versus them" mentality is somewhat tribal and leaves little room for nuance.
If I had a magic want, the US would have a 4 party system. Like a cartesian plane with civil liberalism <-> conservatism on one axis and economic liberalism <-> conservatism on the other axis
I suppose they must account for this somehow but isn't that exactly what a series of proxy wars in far-flung places between the United States and the Soviet Union were?
I don't necessarily agree with Morgenthau and Carr as I think most IR Theory is bullshit made up by academia... particularly the stuff around how players "gain power"
So I make my own argument which mostly hinges on the idea that two powers really means "my power" vs. "everyone else" which is not a recipe for peace
Let's stop treating this as "maybe there's a way to convince people", understand that there is no way to convince some people, and instead just win. Win, and keep winning, and use those wins to eliminate things like voter suppression and gerrymandering, and then never lose again.
And even if your wildest dreams come true–if you win too big, the other side may turn around and say "democracy isn't working for us any more". If it gets to the point that a significant minority of the population (say 20-40%) no longer believes that democracy is in their best interests, democracy's days are numbered. Especially if that significant minority has a great deal of wealth, influence and power. It could end in the peaceful negotiation of a "national divorce"–and there are many worst ways it could end than that.
> the other side may turn around and say "democracy isn't working for us any more".
They do that already, whether it's true or not. That's not a reason to decide to lose.
As a platform, sure it can be better, and it wasn't exactly under the best management before (although the Twitter file leak actually made the old management look better than everyone thought). But lets not pretend that Musk is in this for the platform - he wants control of information to boost Republican leaders because in his mind, he is the savior of human race, so the best leadership is that which allows him to do the things he wants to do.
I'm not a fan of Elon at all at this point. That said, this is more an indictment of the tech industry than Twitter alone. Most employees are some form of left, many of those employees sit on committees, have outsized wealth compared to the average citizen, donate accordingly, the executives among them have power, etc and tech plays an outsized roll on our lives now. This was made a lot more evident when Twitters head of trust and safety was interviewed and she was unable to identify, or had let situations go on, that were offensive to people you'd commonly call right where anything that was offensively to what people would commonly call left was getting combed over and at times over enforced. I'd also say that my perception of her was more that she had large gaps rather than outright hate. The biggest one that comes to mind is "#learntocode" which a bunch of journalists not only wrote articles but also used that hash tag on people working blue collar jobs, such as coal mining, that were under threat at the time. It's an isolated example, but that hash tag stayed promoted for quite a while.
This isn't to say that right-leaning oppression and left-leaninf oppression at categorically the same or have the same categorical effects. It does point to that we have larger class issues at play.
It's either free speech absolutionism, or not free speech. If you claim you are for free speech in the moral sense of the word, you have to let everything be posted.
As soon as you start removing things, it becomes your version of controlled narrative. And there is nothing wrong with just that, because of course you want to minimize potential damage. But then you have to be responsible for the things you let slide.
So when Twitter allows right wing rhetoric, a.k.a conspiracy theories about Nancy pelocies husband, pushed by the CEO, or things like Fauci gain of function research, it's clearly a controlled narrative.