[HN Gopher] Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm
Author : jonknee
Score : 769 points
Date : 2023-03-31 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.twitter.com)
| corbulo wrote:
| It's disappointing the comments are so obsessed with the
| political angle to this that there's a total lack of appreciation
| (or discussion) of opening up the most influential social media
| platform in the world.
| smt88 wrote:
| This is transparency theatre, not actual transparency.
|
| There's no way to actually use this limited release to
| understand how or why any tweet is boosted, so we're in exactly
| the same boat we were in yesterday.
| corbulo wrote:
| This sentiment has high correlation to driving conclusions
| from a very time limited information set. This isn't the only
| part that is going to be posted to github.
|
| What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something
| that can only be a net positive compared to the past
| alternatives? I don't understand the purpose of that
| approach. Help me.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| One of the things that makes my spidey sense tingle is when
| people say _oddly_ sycophantic things about Elon Musk. Twitter
| is big, it 's important. It's not "the most influential social
| media platform in the world".
| corbulo wrote:
| I only see one social media site posts being constantly
| reposted on global news organizations. Are all of the world
| governments and leaders with tens of millions of followers
| actually wasting their time by dedicating their social media
| teams time to twitter instead of focusing on some other
| social media site thats more influential? Which one is it
| then?
|
| It's quite odd to attribute objective analysis to sycophancy.
| I intentionally didn't mention him but here you are bringing
| him up. Who is the sycophant?
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I have to admit I am geeking out whilst skimming source code I
| barely understand.
| yurodivuie wrote:
| I'm sure we can all think of examples where a power structure
| (a company, a country, a prison, a family) invited people in
| for a supervised tour that was less than honest in its
| presentation.
|
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The funny thing is that angle owes itself to Elon coming
| through on his promise to open source this.
|
| This is a great thing.
| deckard1 wrote:
| It would also be a total Elon move to confuse the open
| sourcing of Twitter's internal code with actual transparency.
|
| 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.
| fanagra32 wrote:
| "Opening up"? You must be kidding. Nothing is open there. It's
| just open-washing. A few nice diagrams, but how the services
| _actually_ work is still hidden.
| PenguinRevolver wrote:
| Great pull request here which improves the algorithm:
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/pull/17
| hrpnk wrote:
| Aside from the spam PRs, there is actually one PR that fixes a
| bug: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/pull/242/files
| mdaniel wrote:
| Modern Java actually allows `10_000` for that very reason, as
| does Scala (https://scala-
| lang.org/files/archive/spec/2.13/01-lexical-sy...)
| fooey wrote:
| also javascript - https://github.com/tc39/proposal-numeric-
| separator
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| Add golang to the list.
| sroussey wrote:
| Yes please! I definitely put my thumbs up in there!
| drstewart wrote:
| That will definitely do something! Good job!!
| [deleted]
| BbzzbB wrote:
| It removes the extra weight to Twitter blue tweets?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| If the property names are to be believed it sets a weight
| multiplier to 0. So it prevents recommending them entirely.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It sets the default to zero, but apparently can range up to
| 100. So... what modifies it? (The answer is probably in
| there somewhere, but I'm sure someone will find it before I
| do.)
| zachnwhite wrote:
| [flagged]
| SquareWheel wrote:
| The trouble with spammy jokes like this is it discourages
| companies from bothering with open-source in the future. I
| know I'd be less likely to champion an initiative like this
| if I thought it might blow up in my face.
| drstewart wrote:
| Mature. I'm sure companies looking to outsource work with
| Twin Prime Media would be stoked to see this level of
| maturity.
| matsemann wrote:
| Me feed has lately been full of accounts that have blocked me.
| Like, I see a tweet from someone unknown, click their profile
| and it says I'm blocked.
|
| So wonder if some value is wrong in one of those constants.
| Anyways, the blocking feature is broken..
| super256 wrote:
| I think it's okay to give Twitter Blue users a boost, as it's
| most likely _not_ spam (unlike the 95% of my non-blue followers
| who are bots).
| kevincox wrote:
| I think it makes sense for out-of-network. However I see no
| value for boosting among people that I have followed. If I
| have followed them they definitely aren't spammers (from my
| PoV).
| simonsarris wrote:
| That would be great (unweighting bluechecks) but they actually
| plan to go in the other direction: Starting April 15th non-
| bluechecks won't show up in the "For you" section (the
| algorithm timeline) _at all._ Unpaid users are being written
| completely out of the algo.
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1640502698549075972
| alfor wrote:
| I don't see a way out of this with the GPT/AI able to create
| fake persona in an instant.
| thefreeman wrote:
| What does that matter? If people find the content engaging
| then it will be amplified. If not, it shouldn't be there in
| the first place. This whole "AI / Bot swarm" excuse is just
| smoke and mirrors for "I want more people to pay twitter".
| nonethewiser wrote:
| If _accounts_ find the tweet engaging
| lhnz wrote:
| If "bots indistinguisable from humans" find your "account
| that posts pro-russian propaganda" engaging it will be
| amplified onto your For You page.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Inaccurate. Musk stated that people you follow will continue
| to show up. I only use the 'for you' feed when I'm bored and
| want stupid dopamine hits, I leave it on Following almost all
| the time. But that's on desktop, my understanding it that it
| keeps resetting itself for mobile users (of whom I am not
| one).
| astrange wrote:
| He only said that later; he seems to be working on a "say
| we'll do feature and then change it all after people yell
| at him for weeks" process.
| mgiannopoulos wrote:
| Sounds like moving fast and adjusting to user feedback,
| usually something commendable in tech, right?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| No. There's an implied willingness to listen to people in
| the first place when you're agile in response to
| feedback. You shouldn't have to bruise Elon's ego to get
| him to do not-stupid things.
| cwkoss wrote:
| it's a shame we can no longer short twitter stock
| bradly wrote:
| I believe LeBron James said recently he isn't going to waste
| his money on a blue checkmark, so it should be interesting to
| see what stays and what goes.
| zaroth wrote:
| LeBron doesn't get $84 of value from Twitter? Definitely
| not a political statement going on there.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Parent didn't say it's not "political". It's reasonable
| for a wealthy person to feel that a system that
| discriminates against the poor is not a system they want
| to participate in.
|
| (Note that I use discriminate in the literal sense, as a
| simple statement of fact.)
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| lol you don't actually believe that's his reason do you?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| But the example you give is an appeal to a universal
| moral good. Not partisan politics. So despite saying it's
| not not political, your justification is that it's not
| political.
|
| Also, how did you get a blue check before being able to
| buy one?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Some people unfortunately view concern for the poor as
| political. However my point of mentioning politics is to
| say that "it's political" is not any kind of gotcha when
| it was never denied as being political. Regardless of the
| actual justification being political or not, the
| "political" gotcha is nonsense.
| __jem wrote:
| Twitter doesn't get $84 of value from Lebron?
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| Like it or not but it's the twitter that gets value from
| celebrities. How many people are on social networks jusy
| so see what their fav celebrites are doing?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| It obviously goes both ways. Social media is a megaphone
| and ego boost for celebs.
| mullingitover wrote:
| The problem for twitter is it isn't the only game in town
| when it comes to social media, not by a long shot.
| They're not even in the top ten. They're a megaphone in a
| large pile of megaphones, and those other megaphones
| don't bite the hand that picks them up.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Twitter needs the LeBrons of the world far more than they
| need Twitter.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Most of the major news outlets are not doing so either. The
| Elon stans are crowing that this will be the long-overdue
| end of legacy media, but it strikes me that the new 'blue
| check twitter' might end up becoming even more of a social
| bubble than what it replaced. There are _so_ many low
| quality accounts sporting a checkmark now that users who
| value substance will soon be incentivized to just block
| anyone they find annoying.
| Avshalom wrote:
| yeah, they, uh seem to have realized that's gonna be a
| problem.
|
| 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
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Good find! It'll be funny to see if the incumbents
| respond with 'don't do me any favors.' Also to see
| whether Musk's frens sulk aboit him selling out to the
| elites or so - their gratitude has an extremely short
| half-life.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| So you need a blue check mark to reach non followers and
| Lebron won't get one? Sounds like it's making Twitter
| better already.
| MKais wrote:
| NY Times, WaPo, LA Times and other major accounts too
| https://www.thewrap.com/ny-times-la-times-not-pay-for-
| twitte...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Seems dumb of them. Cost is trivial and their competition
| that isn't so politically motivated will have a much
| further reach.
|
| 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.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > Seems dumb of them. Cost is trivial and their
| competition that isn't so politically motivated will have
| a much further reach.
|
| 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_.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| We're in a time where ideology trumps revenue for some
| companies. You know, "Get woke, go broke."
| flangola7 wrote:
| Everyone says that about things that made tons of money
| though.
| fooey wrote:
| It's smart because Musk already blinked
|
| The top 10,000 are getting exemptions and won't have to
| pay
|
| https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/twitter-business-
| month...
| runako wrote:
| For the NYT to verify their official accounts plus those
| of their reporters (using the Twitter Blue Affiliations
| feature) would be $1m annually. This, for a budget line
| item that has heretofore been $0. In this economy, that's
| a reach.
|
| I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."
| mgiannopoulos wrote:
| How do you get the 1 million figure?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > I don't think the NYT is worried about "reach."
|
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| The NYT has been doing great recently. They're probably
| the legacy news company that's doing the best online of
| anyone.
|
| That's on the strength of having a lot of verticals like
| games, recipes and Wirecutter though.
| adamrezich wrote:
| have you seen @nyttypos and (to a lesser extent)
| @nyt_diff? NYT online editorial standards are hilariously
| abysmal.
|
| https://twitter.com/nyttypos
|
| https://twitter.com/nyt_diff
| astrange wrote:
| Yeah and it doesn't matter.
| drstewart wrote:
| Depends on how they weight the is_user_china_mouthpiece
| variable
| willmeyers wrote:
| Why do companies even bother to put source up on github? To put
| up a front that their open source? What a joke.
| tric wrote:
| GitHub repo: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/
| minimaxir wrote:
| Notably, it's AGPL-licensed.
| [deleted]
| hooverd wrote:
| I wonder how useful this is without the knowledge and tooling
| around deploying it.
| rurp wrote:
| That's my thought as well. Complicated system like this rely
| on all sorts of related services and data stores. This seems
| like the sort of thing that sounds a lot more interesting
| than it is in practice. I would bet many non-technical people
| expect "The Algorithm" to be a straightforward and self-
| contained system.
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm no fan of either Twitter nor Elon Musk, but this is a great
| move and I hope other companies follow what Twitter did here and
| start open sourcing more core parts like this. Maybe it's mostly
| useful for learning how it works, not for directly using it in
| your own product, but the amount of transparency it gives users
| cannot be understated. As long as that actually is the code they
| run, but there would be no way for anyone but Twitter to verify
| that.
| cubefox wrote:
| I think it mainly helps with accountability regarding free
| speech. They did and do several kinds of shadow banning and
| down-boosting to combat spammers, which always has some false
| positives. If you the algorithm is published, you could at
| least better judge and argue when you are unfairly "silenced".
| Since this may be due to an avoidable flaw of the algorithm
| instead of some accepted collateral damage.
| elashri wrote:
| I wonder if it will be possible in one day to know what is values
| of `author_is_power_user`, `author_is_democrat` and
| `author_is_republican` for your account. Does GDPR help with
| that? probably not because maybe they do it for people inside the
| us only so it is not related to EU anyway.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I generally have a very low opinion of social media platforms,
| but I did create a Twitter account for the first time after Musk
| bought the platform.
|
| 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).
| lhnz wrote:
| You can follow accounts that only post arxiv.org links for ML
| papers or anything else you're interested in if you want to. If
| you're only getting entertainment then it says a lot about the
| original accounts you followed.
| sroussey wrote:
| Does it show the part where is recommends Elon more than anyone
| else?
| jmholla wrote:
| I think this PR is modifying the inputs to the methods that do
| it: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/pull/17
| devrand wrote:
| I couldn't find anything specific to that, but I did find thus
| blurb where they seem to explicitly track how often they're
| serving Elon's tweets for A/B testing experiments:
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| Chinjut wrote:
| Perhaps that's related to this line. Though perhaps this is
| just used for observing metrics.
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| JasonZ2 wrote:
| [dead]
| jrwr wrote:
| That whole list is a hoot,
|
| has_toxicity_score_above_threshold
|
| is a interesting value, I wonder were the 0.91 was though up
| at
| ano-ther wrote:
| This is one: https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/issues/121
|
| Search for Elon gives this: https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/search?q=Elon&type=
| tech234a wrote:
| I wonder what the "author_is_elon", "author_is_power_user",
| "author_is_democrat", and "author_is_republican" labels are for
| [1].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/home-
| mixe...
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Here is a screenshot in case this changes later:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/F8GSeyH.png
|
| And, no, this wasn't in a merge-request, it was in the "main"
| branch of HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala.
| tantalor wrote:
| What's all the "DDG"? Is this data from DuckDuckGo?
| asddubs wrote:
| I doubt it, since the isElon thing also has the
| abbreviation
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| Probably something like "Data Distribution Group".
| nanny wrote:
| Maybe the name for an internal service/environment. It's
| also referenced in this viral tweet from November:
|
| https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/1591969100225736
| 7...
| bcherry wrote:
| DuckDuckGoose is the twitter A/B test framework
| mcast wrote:
| That's actually kind of a cool and fitting name.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I see Twitter engineers are not from Minnesota.
| bilekas wrote:
| All in service of 'anti-bias' of course... /s
| [deleted]
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| [dead]
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| pretty sure Elon gets a boost in the algorithm. All okay - he's
| the owner of a private entity and can do as he pleases.
| mnd999 wrote:
| That's what he blew all that cash on. It's the whole point.
| montag wrote:
| Elon is addressing this in the Twitter Space right now. "It
| definitely shouldn't be dividing people into Republican and
| Democrats; that makes no sense[...] you've identified something
| we should be getting rid of right away."
| asddubs wrote:
| but how can we be sure it isn't doing that?! first, we would
| need to figure out a way to identify who-
| Imnimo wrote:
| As if Elon has a clue what that feature is or is not being
| used for.
| dmix wrote:
| He didn't say he knew what it did? It's a good enough
| response to say that it shouldn't be doing that period.
| franky47 wrote:
| We should also not divide people into Elon and non-Elon.
| mseepgood wrote:
| Does it make sense to divide people into Elon and not Elon?
| LiquidSky wrote:
| To Elon, yes.
| krapp wrote:
| It certainly does to Elon.
| furyofantares wrote:
| It's not that uncommon to filter analytics based on how
| much money a user has spent on the platform.
| brink wrote:
| You mean owner and not owner? I think it's fair.
| dyslexit wrote:
| For what purpose? Do we know what this is used for?
| iliane5 wrote:
| Apparently it's for analytics
| fnimick wrote:
| It's for content analytics, and I assume it's to make sure
| that changes to the platform can't be argued to bias one
| party over another.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| You mean like this algorithmic bias?
|
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-
| polit...
| duxup wrote:
| Or even maybe to provide some background to various bits of
| lingo / acronyms people use.
|
| I'm thinking along the lines of common word's that have
| vastly different meanings depending on who's saying it.
| jerlam wrote:
| So false equivalence is written into the platform. Insane
| opinions of one party must be displayed as often as
| moderate opinions of the other. It definitely works for
| angering everyone on Twitter, not so much for actual dialog
| or progress.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or one individual over the rest of the world?
| Calzifer wrote:
| Well, sounds like this pull request doesn't get merged.
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/pull/234
| jaywalk wrote:
| \* \* 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. \*
|
| From: https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| gregw134 wrote:
| So now engineers working on the algo can ensure their
| launches won't lower Elon's tweet visibility. Looks like
| those remaining at Twitter have a knack for corporate
| survival.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yeah, surely the fan-boys who remain at Twitter are
| interested in _lowering_ the visibility of Elon, not the
| opposite.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| I read that as being able to make sure they don't lower
| his engagement with a release
| jacquesm wrote:
| Makes you wonder how they would deal with a reduction in
| Twitter users.
| japhyr wrote:
| I think they meant that Twitter developers can make sure
| their most recent changes won't get them fired by
| lowering his visibility.
| narrator wrote:
| He is the full owner of Twitter. It's his company, so
| nobody is going to fire him as CEO for over-promoting his
| tweets.
| quadcore wrote:
| The users can and often do fire the CEO.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Looks like those remaining at Twitter have a knack for
| corporate survival.
|
| If Green Cards quotas suddenly became available how many
| would stay?
| cvhashim04 wrote:
| When your visa is on the line, you'll do anything
| sabellito wrote:
| Engineers who work at twitter can easily find another job
| in the US.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| even considering all the layoffs other companies are
| doing?
| sabellito wrote:
| What do you think is the percentage of companies who did
| layoffs or have hiring freezes vs companies who are
| hiring high caliber engineers?
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| Can they? I don't know, but I imagine that at this point,
| everyone still working for Twitter is there because they
| don't have any other realistic option.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| That's assuming too much in my opinion. Not everyone has
| the same or similar opinions regarding their work or
| Elon, even if it's hard for you to believe.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I was basing my speculation purely on the working
| conditions there, not on any supposition about people's
| attitudes about their work or Musk.
|
| > even if it's hard for you to believe.
|
| It's not hard for me to believe at all.
| kortilla wrote:
| Only because you are blinded by your own biases. There
| are people there that think it will be the next spacex or
| Tesla
| [deleted]
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Most people working there are looking for other jobs. It
| is not hard to find another job, but in this market it is
| hard to find one that pays the same. A lot of people have
| 4 year stock grants and annual refreshers, pushing their
| compensation very high which can only be matched at other
| tech companies, which currently are not hiring much.
| shortrounddev wrote:
| H1-Bs are harder to get approved these days and a lot of
| companies don't want to go through the effort/cost to do
| so
| sabellito wrote:
| According to this one link [0], H1B "tranfers" are not
| subject to visa caps. Plus you can search for new jobs
| and start the process while still employed.
|
| 0: https://usvisagroup.com/changing-jobs-h-1b-visa
| aetimmes wrote:
| With forced RTO and "hardcore" mandates, it's difficult
| to find 6+ hours of time to interview at other companies
| (assuming there are any open visa sponsorships
| available).
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| It's harder with visas, because you're not gambling if
| you can find another job, you're gambling if your
| employer can acquire a visa in time for you to not be
| deported.
| sabellito wrote:
| Posted on another reply, but according to this one link
| [0] you can start the visa process at a new company while
| still employed at your current job.
|
| 0: https://usvisagroup.com/changing-jobs-h-1b-visa/
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Right, so it's _still_ justified to feel bad for visa
| workers in this case, because they are stuck at an
| abusive workplace because of circumstances of their visa.
| afavour wrote:
| Still smells to high heaven to me. Not the Elon part, I don't
| really care about that. But collecting metrics about
| "republican" vs "democrat" sounds like a particularly bad set
| of priorities at work.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > sounds pretty suspicious.
|
| Sounds toxic to me
| bilekas wrote:
| This exactly.. But without the models or policies we can
| only infer, which give plausible deniability.
|
| Can't say I'm shocked overall, but it's strange to see it
| so 'on the nose'
| JohnFen wrote:
| About 40% of US voters are not registered with any
| political party, so at least they will avoid whatever this
| triggers.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And then there is the rest of the world.
| kuhewa wrote:
| So you imagine these tags are set by looking account
| names up on state voter registration lists?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Well, if not, then the tags have such a large error bar
| as to be meaningless.
| emmo wrote:
| Or the data is assumed good and used dangerously.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Anyone that has worked in social network recommendations (
| _raises hand_ ) knows that they'll be accused of being
| politically biased, particularly if the recommendations
| aren't explicitly promoting biased news sites on the Right.
| (e.g. The Associated Press[0] is leftist propaganda!
| Where's unbiased news like Gateway Pundit[1] or
| InfoWars[5]?!) So data scientists and engineers will get
| pulled in to investigate the latest ref working[2][4], and
| this will let them easily determine that no, there is no
| bias.
|
| 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.theg
| uardian.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...
| kevviiinn wrote:
| Well, there was this:
|
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-
| polit...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| That doesn't say they did anything about it. Just that
| right wing complaints had no substance.
|
| 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...
| kevviiinn wrote:
| I think it says a lot about the complaints. Some people
| just can't stop crying wolf to get attention
| seydor wrote:
| but the people who care about stats are usually american
| politicians. they can present them with this data. (and use
| Elon as a control LOL)
| jcalder wrote:
| I suspect it plays into this stuff: https://www.theguardian
| .com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
|
| They wanted to answer the questions of "is twitter biased
| against Republicans" so they measured it, turns out they
| favored republicans.
| tech234a wrote:
| That makes sense; I guess that means Elon is considered a
| "group" now.
| lhnz wrote:
| I know there's a joke about this regarding his ego and
| there's certainly some truth in that, however it's also
| quite believable that after a deployment he might have
| noticed the popularity of his tweets going down (since he
| no doubt checks his reach), so I can kind of understand how
| he might see "republicans", "democrats" and "celebrities_it
| _makes_sense_to_check_this_with_my_account_as_i_am_a_very_a
| ctive_user" as core categories that need to have their
| reach balanced.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > it's also quite believable that after a deployment he
| might have noticed the popularity of his tweets going
| down
|
| _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...
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The proper way to do that is create a pool of celebrities
| and monitor them. Not just the CEO's 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.
| leye0 wrote:
| ChatGPT suggests: Vitriolic accounts.
| NERD_ALERT wrote:
| We don't need to speculate on this. It sounds like he did
| actually fire engineers over his tweets getting less
| engagement than he wanted.
|
| https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-
| twitter-...
| lhnz wrote:
| Honestly, if you read behind the lines, it sounds like
| the employee was intentionally making a joke about it at
| his expense in front of a bunch of people, and I think a
| lot of CEOs would take that badly as this is effectively
| the same thing as calling your boss egocentric.
|
| 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?
| mochomocha wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| lhnz wrote:
| You mean A/B testing of weights/biases?
| mochomocha wrote:
| No, the "weights" of your model are trained from the
| input data. What is usually AB tested are hyperparameters
| of the model, or different "flavors" of (model+input
| data).
| lhnz wrote:
| What people are implying is still unsubstantiated though.
| The engineers on the Twitter Space say that this is to
| ensure that changes they make do not bias one category
| over another, they don't say that it's in order that they
| can make discretionary updates to bias towards Elon Musk.
|
| 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.
| mochomocha wrote:
| ? Considering Elon as its own category is a bias.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > "When you're asked a question, you run it through your
| head and say 'what is the least fireable response I can
| have to this right now?'" one employee explained.
|
| Reading between the lines, Musk sounds like a giant baby.
| [deleted]
| overthrow wrote:
| I'd love to see the exact date author_is_elon was added. Too
| bad they didn't publish the commit history
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| IIRC it was very recent, there was a Twitter engineer that
| was fired after explaining to Elon that the algorithm was not
| biased against him:
| https://www.salon.com/2023/02/10/petulant-elon-musk-fired-
| tw... Almost certainly after that event Elon had them
| explicitly bump his tweets in their reach.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| This speculation seems mostly informed by a negative
| opinion of Elon. Is there any real indication he gave this
| instruction?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Yes that weekend everyone started seeing Elon's tweets in
| their timelines:
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-
| tweets...
|
| You seem weirdly protective of Elon fyi
| nijave wrote:
| I think around mid February
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-
| tweets...
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I would not be surprised if "author_is_elon" was added after he
| bought the company and worked the engineers too hard to figure
| out why his tweets don't have a lot of engagement.
| burkaman wrote:
| https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-
| specia...
| sekai wrote:
| Haha, that's pretty funny, of course that's a thing
| paulddraper wrote:
| > 1.4k forks
|
| Wow, we're getting some collaboration going!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I haven't read the "algorithm" and this observation might be
| seriously out of date, but:
|
| 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.
| m1117 wrote:
| As I understand, they open sourced only the abstraction, but
| still have a way to control anything.
| froggychairs wrote:
| Why is nobody pointing out that this is likely an April Fools
| joke? We just deployed our April Fools joke into production today
| too.
| endorphine wrote:
| Yeah this confused me a lot while reading the comments here. I
| wonder what percentage of the comments are trolling vs. fell
| for it vs. think it's legit.
|
| Perhaps this calls for an HN poll...
| froggychairs wrote:
| Yeah....
|
| 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
| nabakin wrote:
| I fell for it too until a friend pointed it out. I wonder why
| it's working so well
|
| Edit: hi friend
| froggychairs wrote:
| Lmao
| pictur wrote:
| It's a really scary codebase. Do you really need that much code
| for the world's crappiest recommendation algorithm? I think you
| can do more crap with less code. we trust you elon.
| sho_hn wrote:
| My main questions: Will these repositories be used in production
| by Twitter? Is this now the mainline, not a semi-regularly-synced
| mirror?
| cubefox wrote:
| Musk said that releasing the algorithm will initially be
| embarrassing, but that they will quickly update it. So it seems
| that means they intend to at least regularly publish newer
| versions.
|
| Of course it could also be that they change their mind when
| spammers abuse the openness.
| agluszak wrote:
| Of course not
| koolba wrote:
| It's reassuring to know that billion dollar tech companies write
| CI exactly like I do:
|
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/ci/ci.sh
|
| Permalink: https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| sekai wrote:
| Same mortals as us
| jmull wrote:
| Considering it statistically, likely on a lower plane.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Maybe it's weird, but for all the work I have ever done, I have
| never used CI/CD in the way that it was meant to be used, or
| never really leveraged it. Maybe all of my past jobs were
| unprofessional, but like, I see a lot of jobs using "CI/CD
| experience required" and I think... huh I wonder if they
| actually do it
| scruple wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's necessarily weird, and I'd never call it
| unprofessional, but I have also been using CI of some shape
| or form since I entered the industry in the '00s. From home
| brewed scripts that were cobbled together internally, to CI
| servers on-prem, to CI servers in the cloud, and now back to
| on-prem. At work, I am literally in the middle of a _massive_
| migration of my teams _multiple_ CI servers. We have dozens,
| sometimes hundreds of jobs kicked off on a daily basis + at
| least 2 dozen nightlies. Without CI, our team would be dead
| in the water.
| gspencley wrote:
| It has been my personal experience, over 25 years in the
| industry, that often times the bigger the company the worse the
| code.
|
| 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).
| dblitt wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if they had a script referencing
| internal build infrastructure that got gutted in the open
| source release
| agilob wrote:
| It's called Volkswagen CI
| cmckn wrote:
| Including the search engine itself in "the algorithm" repo is an
| interesting choice. Obviously it's a major player in what gets
| returned to clients, but the details of that infrastructure
| aren't really relevant and is a notable portion of their secret
| sauce.
|
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/tree/main/src/java/...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why does anyone use "for you"?
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| [dead]
| teach wrote:
| Probably the same reason some people browse /r/all on Reddit. I
| think the desire for that sort of thing has waned a lot over
| the past couple of years, though.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| Not quite the same. All does 0 user customized ordering. It
| is based on some "algorithm" but it's the same for all users.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| You gotta hand it to Elon - he actually did it.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Where is the file containing accounts that are artificially
| boosted? We can guess what its single line is, but how is it
| incorporated into the algorithm?
| minimaxir wrote:
| If you look at the GitHub repo, most of it is READMEs
| describing systems, not the models or code subleties which
| actually give explanations into how certain weird behaviors on
| Twitter happen. (e.g. the preference of certain users in the
| For You tab. EDIT: bad example, since there appears to be a
| flag for that in the code, although it does not specify _which_
| users are on the list)
| mquander wrote:
| The links in the README just go to other documents, but the
| repo seems to have most of the code for the components the
| documents are describing.
| minimaxir wrote:
| It seems to vary by service; some are more detailed than
| others.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Yeah but whats the grift this time? There is always an angle
| with this guy.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Or an alternative view: no matter what he does there will
| always be haters and there are massive (political) incentives
| to destroy his public persona.
|
| Those incentives also align nicely with those of hedge funds
| that are short TSLA as well as family offices that are short
| Tesla (hello Billy boy Gates).
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| > ... no matter what he does there will always be haters.
|
| Yes. Why? Because he's an jerk that deserves it. He's done
| and said enough dumb shit that people should take him with
| an ocean's worth of salt.
| rurp wrote:
| Gets him a positive news cycle without much cost. It's hard
| to immediately say how interesting or useful this will be
| since there are probably a number of related systems and
| databases that aren't released.
| illiarian wrote:
| The angle, on the same day, or close to same day:
|
| - API free tier gutted. The "hobby/student" tier is at $100 a
| month, next tier is "enterprise" https://twitter.com/TwitterD
| ev/status/1641222782594990080?s=...
|
| - For You page will only contain tweets from paid accounts:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1640502698549075972
| nemothekid wrote:
| https://twitter.com/dril/status/831805955402776576
| jonahbenton wrote:
| LOL. My algorithm at twitter had been very simple-
|
| 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!
| mgiannopoulos wrote:
| This still exists as the Following tab and viewing it is a
| persistent option. You don't need to see the algorithm feed
| ("For You") ever.
| cauthon wrote:
| Roughly one in every four to five tweets in the "following"
| feed is a "promoted" tweet, at least on mobile.
|
| 20-25% noise isn't a great ratio for something that I
| ostensibly curate.
| hk__2 wrote:
| "promoted" tweets are ads, just like you would see on
| almost any website you don't pay for.
| raydev wrote:
| Do we "gotta hand it to Elon" for not missing one of his 40-50
| self-imposed deadlines and feature announcements?
| addisonl wrote:
| Did he? Considering the vast majority of the algorithm is waved
| away as "ML model".
| thieving_magpie wrote:
| I can't pretend to know if this contains the actual ML model
| code but there is a second repo the-algorithm-ml:
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml
| rogerallen wrote:
| "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."
|
| 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.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| > "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." 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.
|
| 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.
| vagabund wrote:
| I'm not on twitter enough for the chronological feed to be
| appealing to me, and instead want to see the notable tweets
| from the accounts I follow since the time I last visited.
| There's no straightforward way to achieve this, but if anyone
| else has this preference, the workaround is to create a
| twitter list with all the accounts you follow and set it to
| show top tweets first.
| rogerallen wrote:
| I said I despised the algorithm, I did not say I hated
| Twitter. Now I at least know why I hate it.
|
| 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.
| Sebguer wrote:
| If you try to use the Following tab on Android, every refresh
| brings you back to the For You tab.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Is your app up to date? I have it on my iPhone, iPad, and
| an Android device which all have no problem always
| remembering the "Following" tab selection. As well as
| desktop/web.
| matsemann wrote:
| Pressing the home button on Android often switches the
| tab over to "for you"
| rvz wrote:
| Care to comment on this? [0] Surely Twitter hasn't open
| sourced and released the recommendation algorithm as you
| predicted right?
|
| Or perhaps when a prediction didn't go according to plan,
| let us complain about another thing...
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35213705
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| "Control Panel for Twitter" plugin. You can get rid of "For
| You".
| corbulo wrote:
| I'm confused, then why not just use your 'followed' feed
| instead of 'for you'?
| glenstein wrote:
| I'm also confused. You can still see everything you've
| manually curated.
| bakugo wrote:
| On the android app at least, a recent update made it so
| pressing the home button while you're in the "followed" tab
| switches to the "for you" tab. It's extremely annoying
| whalesalad wrote:
| Two space indent in .py? Provocative.
| jml2 wrote:
| ( "has_toxicity_score_above_threshold",
| _.getOrElse(EarlybirdFeature,
| None).exists(_.toxicityScore.exists(_ > 0.91)) )
| jml2 wrote:
| `if (sourceUserId.isDefined || sourceUserId.isDefined)
| Some(true)`
|
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/timeliner...
| etc_passwd wrote:
| Democrats / Republicans looks like it was added outside of SDLC
| [1]. This order without those features is sorted, likely by a
| linter, suggesting Elon and Vits are properly implemented, and
| Democrats/Republicans was just inserted alongside the Elon
| feature, perhaps just for this extract. Sorting it now results in
| a different order than the commit.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| lenzm wrote:
| Or Elon was the addition, the other 3 are in alpha order.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| [dead]
| WA wrote:
| Will this make it easier to game the algo or does it depend so
| heavily on individual user interaction that it's close to
| impossible to game it? For example, by carefully crafting Tweets
| or by buying likes/retweets etc?
| paxys wrote:
| While open sourcing code is always great, and kudos on them for
| doing so, let's be real most people didn't care about the
| internal plumbing of how their recommendation system runs. It's
| going to be a mess of decades old code, microservices and ML
| pipelines just like one would expect. If you want to dig deeper
| to check for biases (the reason they claimed to be open sourcing
| it in the first place), you will however run into:
|
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml,
| which points to this.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I couldn't care less about Twitter's high level abstractions.
| They were never renowned for those. Their database schemas and
| infrastructure on the other hand...
| beebmam wrote:
| I don't use Twitter, but this is awesome. I hope this will help
| more people realize how complex it is to build and operate web
| services.
| distrill wrote:
| the-algorithm is such a pretentious name for a repo
| BbzzbB wrote:
| It's a colloquial term for recommendation engines, how often do
| you hear people say "the algorithm" (vs. "the recommendation
| engine") on YouTube?
| distrill wrote:
| yes, but this is the first repository i have seen named like
| this
| krapp wrote:
| It's because there's been nearly a decade of conspiracy
| theory around the use of algorithmic feeds in social media
| generally, and Twitter specifically. Among the right,
| "algorithms" have become symbolic of the machinery of
| leftist oppression they believe to be arrayed against them
| by modern media.
|
| So this language is Elon signaling that he's presenting the
| "woke hivemind's" head on a platter.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Eh, it's name-spaced.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Great! But nothing is going to change until people realize that
| the problem is the _feedback loop_. It 's not the recommendation
| engine itself, it's the fact that there's no way "out" of the
| feed that the engine produces. It recommends you stuff, you have
| little choice but to engage with it, and then _it trains on that
| information_.
|
| This is the problem with most of social media today. It is a very
| well known problem in 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...
| hdivider wrote:
| Thank you! Working on a concept for a big org on what may
| become a large ML-based system one day. I knew about this
| feedback loop issue, but was too dumb to actually remember and
| face this problem. :) It's all over today's rec engines -- and
| yet, just like the things we're not shown in these systems, the
| problem itself seems to become invisible. Because it requires
| new thinking.
|
| Worth exploring.
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| Don't you have a choice.. to not engage with it? If you didn't
| like it then assuming the metrics system is working correctly,
| this would be negative feedback to the ML model, causing said
| content to not be shown in the future.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Couple problems:
|
| 1. Actively supplying negative feedback is sometimes hidden
| behind secondary menus, making it much higher friction
| compared to just...scrolling past. So most users don't spend
| the effort. Even with a dislike button, it's unclear what the
| system is learning. It can't know that I don't like this
| particular video because it's a conspiracy theory, and to
| stop showing me those. These platforms often don't 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.
| zrezzed wrote:
| Twitter _could_ recreate a similar system: 1) auto-tag
| tweets with labels, rather than users needing to submit to
| subreddits 2) auto-sub most people some default set of
| labels 3) let them un-sub if they want.
|
| They just don't want to.
| khy wrote:
| I think Instagram in particularly is bad in this regard. It
| seemingly becomes convinced that I care deeply about the
| subject of any post that I even momentarily linger on.
| dmonitor wrote:
| reminds me of a story about a guy who was given a gift, a
| decorative plate with a rooster on it i think it was. didn't
| care for it too much, but out of politeness put it on display
| on an empty cabinet he had. a while later someone noticed he
| had it and figured he liked it, so got him a similar decorative
| plate with a rooster on it. again, out of politeness, he put it
| next to the old one. now other people started to think he just
| really liked roosters, and started giving him little rooster
| statues and nicknacks. Eventually he just has a whole display
| cabinet of rooster themed gifts that he never really cared for
| to begin with, but people just assume he likes them because
| people keep giving them to him.
| Washuu wrote:
| I have a whole shelf full of horse stuff because of this!~
| roddylindsay wrote:
| 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
|
| Who set those weights, and why were they chosen?
| Mehdi2277 wrote:
| Having worked at similar companies on similar systems usually
| A/B experiments and smaller probability of an action bigger
| weight it must have to matter much overall. The constants are
| generally done through some ab tests to get them into
| reasonable overall behavior but they are a pain to tune and
| very unlikely optimal in any real sense as it's often too
| difficult to do extensive search of them. Like often I'll see
| new target have a couple different weights tried on an ab and
| then maybe second set of experiments after rough magnitude is
| determined.
| bobbygoodlatte wrote:
| "recap.engagement.is_replied": 27
| "recap.engagement.is_replied_reply_engaged_by_author": 75
|
| I wonder if this is why threads rank so obnoxiously high. They
| get artificially boosted by the author replying to their own
| tweet
| localplume wrote:
| isn't that the author replying to a reply on their tweet? so
| its promoting positive discussion, hence pushing the
| engagement higher?
| jonknee wrote:
| projects/home/recap/FEATURES.md has some interesting stuff:
|
| 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.
| kossTKR wrote:
| I've pretty much ignored all of the superficial political theatre
| but noticed the actual algo worsening over the last 6 months.
|
| 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.
| jonathanmayer wrote:
| Context: I teach at Princeton and study social media and
| recommendation systems.
|
| From a very quick skim of the repositories, this appears to be
| quite limited transparency. The documentation gives a decent
| high-level overview of how Tweet recommendation works--no
| surprises--and the code tracks that roadmap. Those are meaningful
| positive steps. But the underlying policies and models are almost
| entirely missing (there are a couple valuable components in [1]).
| Without those, we can't evaluate the behavior and possible
| effects of "the algorithm."
|
| [1] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml
| modeless wrote:
| What about these? https://huggingface.co/Twitter
| simonw wrote:
| Those look older to me. They all have last updated dates for
| October and November 2022.
| EastSmith wrote:
| FB open source algo looks much better, right? /s
| ngrilly wrote:
| What did you expect?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I don't know if the parent's expectations matter here. This
| is more about making sure others don't misunderstand the
| meaning here.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| Can i audit your classs for free?
| meghan_rain wrote:
| So why did they opensource it?
| justapassenger wrote:
| You must be new to Musk's business practices.
| bradly wrote:
| Because they let go many of the engineers working on it?
| daveguy wrote:
| So they could pretend to be open. It's the "Open"AI model.
| Open-washing?
| cubefox wrote:
| This is a very cynical take. They should be commended for
| publishing recommendation code at all, which no other major
| social network does.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| a large portion of HN users view anything elon musk does
| as nefarious, which is why half of these comments are
| negative.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah it seems so. I think journalists have portrayed him
| way too negatively. For example, they mostly ignored the
| Twitter files, presumably because it didn't fit their
| political narrative.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Cynicism is the standard operating procedure on HN for
| anything that tilts against their party lines. It's
| completely illiberal.
| guelo wrote:
| Any time a billionaire buys a media company it's bad for
| the health of democracy.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Which is why HN was so incensed about Bezos buying the
| Washington Post.
| simondotau wrote:
| And when a highly scrutinised, highly visible billionaire
| buys it off a different bunch of billionaires which you
| know little about?
| misiti3780 wrote:
| i wasnt referring to him buying twitter, i was referring
| to him saying he was going to open source the
| recommendation engine and then doing it.
|
| i agree billionaires owning media companies is huge
| problem
| mulmen wrote:
| Do you believe billionaires can do good? Is their
| existence an existential threat to democracy?
| hooverd wrote:
| Yes. There are plenty of philanthropic billionaires. Yes.
| That much money buys a destabilizing amount of influence.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Billionaires are billionaires not by literally storing
| cash. The rest of the society values their contributions
| and creations in the companies/corporations they run.
| Sure, they have some liquidity but the entire concept of
| resentment towards billionaires is essentially equal to
| resentment for the betterment of the world. There are
| some exceptions but for the most part, in a well oiled
| market, you can't just become a billionaire by fucking
| over people. See Adani and how it turns out for him: http
| s://www.ft.com/content/5c0b6174-e66d-4fa5-89a5-6da1d69ab.
| ..
| systemvoltage wrote:
| We need more inequality. It's a feature, not a bug.
| Entire swaths of people are convinced we need to flatten
| all people into one income bracket. That's not going to
| end well. See USSR and Cambodian massacre.
|
| That doesn't mean we should propel poverty.
|
| Midwits have been brainwashed into thinking "equity =
| good" with no critical thinking capability. The entire
| political college class screams "How can you be against
| equality!" followed by insinuations and fascism insults.
| The term "human rights" have been hijacked into
| socialism/communism propaganda.
|
| It's so deeply fucked.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Can you name one relevant media company owned by someone
| from the working class?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Not necessarily. What if the media company was bad for
| the health of democracy, and the billionaire's
| incompetence destroys the company's social standing and
| thus its ability to do more damage (even in the
| billionaire's own interests)?
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the
| money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out.
| Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were
| dead?
|
| (Regardless I think that would be useless in the long
| run, since the millions of stranded users will still want
| another Twitter-like platform. And Twitter imploding
| without a designated archive will wipe out a tremendous
| amount of digital history.)
|
| A lot of his decisions look pretty incompetent in the
| surface, like how could he not see how charging for
| verification devalue the system to whoever has the money?
|
| Instead it could just be an intentional ploy to
| completely devalue Twitter disguised as incompetence. He
| can justify firing employees and charging for API
| access/verification as money-saving strategies, even if
| they're terrible strategies that have little chance of
| succeeding. And he could make enough people believe he's
| an idiot who makes things up as he goes rather than
| someone specifically driven or apathetic enough to run
| Twitter into the ground. Not to mention he was forced to
| buy them after changing his mind. Almost feels like a "so
| that's what happens" response.
|
| I wonder how higher powers would be able to distinguish
| fake incompetence from real incompetence. Would they care
| how Twitter as a private company ends up if it's the case
| that it implodes from its own legitimately bad business
| decisions? It reminds me of how employers won't directly
| fire employees for discriminatory reasons, instead they
| make the employees' lives miserable so they're compelled
| to leave on their own, thus they escape scrutiny.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| This is basically at the level of "9/11 was an inside job
| to bring down WTC 1, but WTC2 was destroyed in an
| unrelated but simultaneous terrorist attack"
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the
| money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out.
| Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were
| dead?
|
| > (Regardless I think that would be useless in the long
| run, since the millions of stranded users will still want
| another Twitter-like platform.
|
| If there's not an obvious successor, _right when its
| shutdown_ , a lot of those people might get their habit
| broken and find something better to do. I know Mastodon
| was held up as a successor, but it's unclear to me if
| that's actually capable of scaling to that level.
| dmix wrote:
| Mastodon is way too flawed to be anything but a niche
| tool for tech people and activists. I highly highly doubt
| such a system can cross the chasm. That doesn't mean
| that's a bad thing though.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Well if they say "we will open source the algorithm" and
| then what they really open source is a little bit of
| slightly relevant code that doesn't allow us to
| understand the algorithm, then what we can deduce is that
| they are trying to weasel out of public commitments.
|
| I can't say for sure if that happened, but if they made a
| clear promise and then did something else, it's perfectly
| reasonable to call that out.
| [deleted]
| philote wrote:
| Hey, we can get even more cynical. Why should we trust
| that this code is even similar to what they run in
| production currently?
| [deleted]
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I still hear reverse-FUD about nvidia supposedly fully
| open-sourcing their Linux driver, when in reality they
| opened a tiny kernel portion of it that allows the main
| proprietary blob to connect to necessary kernel
| interfaces. You have to call out this bullshit when you
| see it.
| hanniabu wrote:
| This is like FB open sourcing the compiled frontend code
| you can see yourself using inspect.
|
| If we commend them for this we're helping promote and
| encourage this faux open source virtue signaling
| cubefox wrote:
| No, that's very different.
| rakoo wrote:
| Let's have reasonable goals, shall we ? "Their shit
| doesn't stink as bad as others'" is nothing commendable,
| especially after souch publicity.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If we are willing to not assume some borderline "it's what
| they want you to think" conspiracy play, obviously there
| was always going to be a lot of highly interested and
| qualified people taking a very close look at this and, at
| some point, there was always going to be very definitive
| conclusion of what's the deal with what they released.
|
| 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.
| correlator wrote:
| There is clearly a lot of information to share. It's worth
| considering this could be step 1 of n as opposed to
| assuming the worst possible intention.
| joshspankit wrote:
| That was one of Elon's core statements when he first talked
| about buying Twitter. If he had gotten it out sooner there
| would be an easier link between the two, but if you want more
| context just go read the old tweets and articles from the
| Twitter vs Elon days.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| PR
| avanti wrote:
| It's no secret that Twitter, like any other social media
| platform, is driven by user engagement and ad revenues. The
| more time we spend on the platform, the more valuable it
| becomes for them. With this new open-source algorithm,
| they're essentially crowdsourcing improvements to their
| system to better serve us the content we crave.
|
| 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.
| kzrdude wrote:
| If we can't build anything with this, is it "source"?
| [deleted]
| bilekas wrote:
| "Does not include batteries"
| w0m wrote:
| PR and it was already leaked last week.
| alfor wrote:
| [flagged]
| tpmx wrote:
| Did you also skim the accompanying (or rather, main) repo,
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm ?
|
| From a quick clone and line-count, it has: 235
| kLOC .scala 136 kLOC .java 22 kLOC .py 7
| kLOC .rs
|
| So I don't think you did, since you posted so quickly and
| that's a LOT of code.
|
| 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.)
| bilekas wrote:
| > 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."
|
| 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.
| fanagra32 wrote:
| Exactly. Open-washing at its finest. Just like OpenAI. "Open"
| just doesn't mean anything anymore at this point.
|
| > Context: I teach at Princeton and study social media and
| recommendation systems.
|
| I'm not sure how this context was relevant. Your post was
| perfectly able to stand on its own feet and convince through
| content, not through authority. If anything, this "context"
| removed pondus from it by appealing to authority.
| eecc wrote:
| Wouldn't that make them easy prey of "spam SEO". However, given
| the framework isn't it still possible to guess the models?
| robopsychology wrote:
| Congrats on reading several hundred thousand lines of code in 1
| hour and 8 minutes :)
| elorm wrote:
| You missed this in your rush to display your newly acquired
| sarcasm101 skills: "Skim": To read quickly or
| cursorily, to glance over, or to omit details in order to get
| the gist of something.
| robopsychology wrote:
| Context: I studied at Oxford
|
| Fair point, I missed that when I skimmed OPs comment
| pnt12 wrote:
| It's fast to read stuff when you have the domain knowledge.
| The weights won't be a 5kb Scala file: they'd probably be a
| big binary file, which is easy to search it github/locally
| after cloning.
|
| Otherwise, if they are provided, someone in the thread will
| surely point to them.
| culi wrote:
| imagine thinking you need to read every file in a project to
| understand the architecture and which pieces are important
| for specific functionality you're looking to understand. Have
| you ever picked up a bugfix ticket for some code you didn't
| write?
| tpmx wrote:
| We should really all just bow in awe as we are clearly
| inferior.
| robopsychology wrote:
| Princeton has a Code Reading 101 that all
| postdocs/professors must take, however in exchange for the
| _Secrets of Speed Reading_ you must acknowledge every
| message with where you learnt those skills.
| raggi wrote:
| class project, 200 students, 1500 LoC each. Time for grading.
|
| there are contexts in which this may be well practiced.
| kadavy wrote:
| For example, MostRecentCombinedUserSnapshotSource seems to be
| influential (such as for calculating "tweepcred"), but we can't
| see how it's calculated.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| My favorite is ci/ci.sh #!/bin/sh exit
| 0
| summarity wrote:
| Main repos:
|
| - 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...
| jmeister wrote:
| Twitter spaces live right now:
| https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1jMJgLdenVjxL
| Patrickmi wrote:
| Didn't Elon check the codebase before open sourcing it, like was
| he expecting everyone to be happy when seeing author_is_elon ?
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| https://twitter.com/jarokrolewski/status/1641892148084629504
| > the main neural network part of @Twitter recsys algo is based
| on 2021 work of #SinaWeibo - Chinese clone of Twitter
|
| interesting claim
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| https://twitter.com/Sandeeparuchuri/status/16419015979860172...
| > Part of twitter's algo Jack Dorsey, Katy Perry, Stephen Curry
| and Barack Obama as "testing accounts" for getting random
| Tweets for testing
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| Some more strange quirks:
|
| 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
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Might be a language barrier from my side but it doesn't
| really sound like a "strange quirk" but rather a wise
| decision. Following people to get followers is one of the
| oldest spam methods on social media. It's not surprising that
| they would reduce the reach of accounts using those methods.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| good point! "interesting insight" might have been a better
| phrase. i am just skimming twitter to get some scoops on
| the algo release
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| https://twitter.com/_johnforte/status/1641900138305134594
| > 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.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| https://twitter.com/federicolois/status/1641900547555901441
| > Interesting piece here. If you are following less than
| 500 and you are verified your reputation is 100.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| https://twitter.com/carlcarrie/status/1641900542573133826
| > The Twitter Algo uses graph of followers and tweet
| similarity to identify what alignment you are politically
| hk__2 wrote:
| > > Twitter is also using the page rank algo that google
| created
|
| Nitpick, but the PageRank algorithm was created before
| Google, because it was the foundation of it.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Kudos for open-sourcing this.
| pram wrote:
| I wonder what determines 'cred' for this part:
|
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| pram wrote:
| I answered my own question 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."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Heh, I knew it. You need to prune your own following list
| regularly or become less and less visible. I suspect (but
| have yet to check) that they also weight visibility in terms
| of historical follower growth.
|
| 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.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Say what you will about Elon, but this wouldn't have happened
| without him. Thanks!
|
| And thank you to everyone at Twitter who helped organize this
| release. Open sourcing something like this is no small effort.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I am not sure about that. Twitter has open sourced a lot of
| stuff in the past. There were certainly people there who would
| run the site as a nonprofit public service if they had the
| choice.
| robopsychology wrote:
| But they haven't open sourced their recommendation engine in
| the past
| BryantD wrote:
| This release seems less immediately valuable than their other
| contributions, but historically more significant. It's a pity
| we don't have commits although that would be a huge privacy
| issue.
|
| But yeah, while I would never work for Elon I'm glad he did
| this.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Twitter had 18 years to publish their algorithm under the
| previous management and they didn't.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Well, they didn't
| sangnoir wrote:
| Twitter contributed a lot to Map-Reduce, ETL and Scala
| communities: IMO they punched above thier weight.
|
| 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.
| zachnwhite wrote:
| --
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The importance of Twitter was it being the primary posting
| location for a lot of things. A number of the artists and
| other creatives I know have gotten absolutely gutted by this.
| nicky0 wrote:
| Gutted about what exactly? Twitter is still there and
| pretty much works like before.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| By open sourcing the algorithm? Or what?
| JSavageOne wrote:
| [flagged]
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I'd be nothing without Twitter. It's had more impact on my
| life than any other platform. I got lucky, but luck was only
| part of it.
|
| Being able to DM people is incredible. It's the AOL Messenger
| of 2023. If it went offline, it'd be a terrible loss.
| zachnwhite wrote:
| [flagged]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This isn't /g/, you have to employ a minimum level of
| politeness here.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I did. Your mother sends her regards.
|
| (Joking aside, you'll find HN to be a wonderful place to
| hang out, but only if you get into the right mindset. In
| the meantime, enjoy your weekend.)
| zachnwhite wrote:
| You literally said "I'd be nothing without twitter."
| Please use this weekend to reevaluate your life.
| jytechdevops wrote:
| its literally led to the complete change of my future due
| to the ability to follow the interactions of successful
| people who are active on the platform. I've learned from
| them as if they were my direct mentors and made huge life
| decisions based on some of their talking points /
| motivational mindset. Without it, my life would've been a
| bubble in Virginia with my nearest network being 5 friends
| who love cranking out bottle on the weekends.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Politicans and companies all over the world are using it.
| Controlling that information space, is real power. And I am
| not yet clear, how much that release will bring needed
| transparency. As the algorithm in production, can have major
| tweaks.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Judging by the many "issues" already, it might have been a bad
| idea to release on a friday, though.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| I'm not connecting the dots. Why is it bad to release on
| Friday?
| dmix wrote:
| It's not like they are going to release an emergency patch
| fix. This was a one way street.
| dawnerd wrote:
| This is 100% not their working copy.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well yes, but I am pretty sure, elon envisoned warm welcome
| by the OS community and help for free and now that is off
| to a bad start.
| [deleted]
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I doubt he thought he'd get any help for free, given I
| don't think you can run this code there isn't a
| meaningful way to contribute.
|
| It's just about transparency or PR, take your pick.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "given I don't think you can run this code there isn't a
| meaningful way to contribute."
|
| 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.
| undersuit wrote:
| He literally tweeted:
|
| "No doubt, many embarrassing issues will be discovered,
| but we will fix them fast!"
| dmix wrote:
| People noticing stuff is free work but it's still
| different than getting PRs and actual solutions like a
| real OSS project. And that's fine, people are doing it
| because they care or like the attention or outrage and
| all the other personal/social motivations.
| [deleted]
| cwkoss wrote:
| The twitter algorithm sucks balls and heavily overweights who's
| paid for a checkmark.
|
| The default feed view has grown increasingly useless over the
| past ~6 months.
| lhnz wrote:
| I don't think any changes to bias towards bluechecks have been
| made yet.
| cwkoss wrote:
| A significant portion of my 'for you' is low quality tweets
| from paid bluechecks.
|
| The people who are willing to pay to be heard more seem to be
| willing because everyone is already tired of listening to
| them.
| benatkin wrote:
| Party in the issues: https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/issues
| rco8786 wrote:
| So as expected, there is exactly nothing that favors posters from
| one side of the political spectrum. I don't expect that this
| article will do anything to calm down those who are convinced
| otherwise though.
|
| Well written article, from an engineer's perspective.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| [dead]
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| Algorithm exists and is non-trivial, therefore it favors those
| groups of posters that spend more effort to hack it.
| vore wrote:
| Well, it does say this: 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.
|
| This is basically the ultimate black box, so I don't think you
| can really conclude anything like this either way.
| bombcar wrote:
| More like the ultimate hug box generator, that will quickly
| partition you into a self-reinforcing bucket.
| paxys wrote:
| Since this is what most people are going to want to see:
|
| > 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.
| ProAm wrote:
| 1) Fire/layoff 75% of employees.
|
| 2) Open source the code base.
|
| 3) Get the community to code for you free of charge.
|
| 4) Profit. (hopefully +$20B)
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Wouldn't any such system depend on 10 other internal systems, 20
| databases directly or indirectly, each affecting the behaviour of
| the recommendation engine. That makes me doubtful studying such a
| recommendation engine is any better than a purely academic
| exercise.
| justrealist wrote:
| Having anything public at all is wildly better than the nothing
| that is standard among social media companies.
|
| Let's not focus criticism on an attempt to do _something_.
| sithlord wrote:
| thats why its "the algorithm" not the source of data/truth
| softfalcon wrote:
| You're probably right, but analyzing such things could still be
| useful for research.
|
| 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!
| javajosh wrote:
| Is there demand for a service that simply shows you the things
| the people you follow wrote? (It would be up to you not follow so
| many people that you can't keep up.)
| matesz wrote:
| It is really nice to see how bazel is used in the wild. It looks
| so clean. Why we are not using it for everything?
| pledess wrote:
| there may be a hint of which elections were of interest:
|
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| Would it be developed in open as well or there will be frequent
| merge from their internal repos?
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| Interesting: // 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)
|
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/src/scala...
| dmix wrote:
| How long does the NSA record them?
| tric wrote:
| From https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92... (
| "author_is_elon", candidate => candidate
| .getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature,
| None).contains(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsElonFeature, 0L))),
| ( "author_is_power_user", candidate =>
| candidate .getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
| .exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsVitsFeature,
| Set.empty[Long]).contains)), (
| "author_is_democrat", candidate =>
| candidate .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)), )
| philistine wrote:
| Coded as if the only two political parties on the planet were
| the Rs and the Ds. Shameful.
| bikeformind wrote:
| I opened this thread just to verify this would be top comment,
| good job hn
| [deleted]
| jdnordy wrote:
| github link now show a warning at the top of the page:
|
| > 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?
| jawns wrote:
| The author_is_elon flag doesn't surprise me, but the two
| political designators are somewhat shocking. I'd sure like to
| know what changes based on what Twitter knows about your
| political affiliation.
| jen20 wrote:
| It's not that shocking...
|
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| I thought it was interesting how it explicitly doesn't boost
| independents. So much of the two-party system is self-
| reinforcing.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Or anti-statists! Not everyone who engages with politics is
| a bootlicker for authoritarianism but it sure feels like
| there's no space made for this perspective (obviously)
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I'd be interested in which bin people like Joe Manchin,
| Kyrsten Sinema, Susan Collins, et. al. are placed.
| emodendroket wrote:
| The vast majority of self-proclaimed independents vote with
| one party just as reliably as registered members.
| philistine wrote:
| American's lax attitude towards cultivating more than two
| parties is literally killing the republic from the
| inside.
| airstrike wrote:
| You'd think a country that played a central role in a
| global, decades-long unstable regime of bipolar power
| that routinely pushed mankind to the brink of nuclear
| oblivion would know better than to have a bipolar
| electoral system
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > routinely pushed mankind to the brink of nuclear
| oblivion
|
| I'm struggling to think of a reason why this is anything
| but bad faith nonsense.
| weaksauce wrote:
| have you never heard of the many times we almost came to
| setting off full scale nuclear warfare because of the
| bipolar power war of the ussr v usa et.al.?
|
| the only thing that saved us was cooler heads that
| prevailed on both sides.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Why would throwing more actors with similar capabilities
| into the mix make the situation any more stable though?
| That seems like basically the old European Balance of
| Power, which broke out into open conflict more
| frequently.
| emodendroket wrote:
| In some other countries the different interest groups
| sort themselves into two factions _after_ being elected
| but I don 't know that it is really that different in
| practice.
| TillE wrote:
| It's not different, or rather it doesn't produce
| meaningfully different outcomes. I'm not aware of any
| parliamentary system with a wonderful diversity of
| thought and a long record of positive accomplishments.
| You end up with ruling coalitions which are typically
| pretty awful.
|
| 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.
| hraedon wrote:
| It isn't an attitudinal problem, it is the logical
| outcome of our political systems. In political science it
| is known as Duverger's law: single ballot, winner take
| all systems inevitably tend toward a two party
| equilibrium.
|
| 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.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > single ballot, winner take all systems inevitably tend
| toward a two party equilibrium.
|
| 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.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I thought it was interesting how it explicitly doesn't
| boost independents. So much of the two-party system is
| self-reinforcing.
|
| Is it boosting? Others are claiming this code is just for
| metrics collection:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391896.
|
| But on the topic of Democrats vs. Republican vs.
| independent; a big factor may be that "Democrat" and
| "Republican" are much more cohesive groups and therefore
| much 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.
| dd36 wrote:
| Why measure something if you don't intend to change it?
| astrange wrote:
| So you can make sure not to accidentally change it.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| And if one party trends more towards violent extremism,
| they get boosted the same as before?
| boringg wrote:
| There are many reasons to measure things if you don't
| intend to change them.
| jandrese wrote:
| Depends what the metrics are used for. It doesn't make
| sense to apply artificial boosts to metrics that are only
| used for internal accounting. Well, maybe if you have an
| egotist CEO, but that wouldn't explain the rest of the
| boosts. We have to assume this code has some sort of
| effect somewhere.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Isn't it intrinsically self-reinforcing, if you have a
| winner takes all system? It's almost always better to join
| an existing team than start a new one.
| airstrike wrote:
| Also how about.... everyone else in the world who is not an
| American voter?
| threeseed wrote:
| Only anecdotally.
|
| But ever since Musk took over the amount of US political
| content has significantly increased in particular from
| the right despite me not living in the US.
|
| It's hard to tell whether previously political content
| was weighted less and Musk has removed those controls or
| whether they are now weighted higher.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Some of the power users Musk reportedly had boosted are
| specifically right wing political posters, like catturd2.
| But then he's also boosted some high profile left leaning
| politicians, so it's not exclusive. It does mean you're
| more likely to see right wing American political content
| either way, which has to be annoying for people outside
| of the US.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/twitter-algorithm-aoc-ben-shapiro-
| cattur...
| realjhol wrote:
| Why do you believe it would be annoying to us?
| fyloraspit wrote:
| Would it not be just as annoying to see a slant the other
| direction, or in any extreme direction?
| meragrin_ wrote:
| I live in the US in "Trump country" and don't see any
| political content. Maybe its just related to the people
| you follow and the content you look at?
| tormeh wrote:
| This is what it means to let another country own your
| social media. Their ideas and memes unconsciously get
| preferential treatment. This is maybe not a good thing,
| but it is what it is.
| adamckay wrote:
| > Their ideas and memes unconsciously get preferential
| treatment.
|
| I think as this repo shows it's conciously, rather than
| unconsciously, getting preferential treatment.
| blululu wrote:
| It's omission. They built for Americans because they were
| Americans. No one building this said "let's ignore
| Canadian politics" or any other country, they just didn't
| think about them at all, because like most Americans they
| don't really care about the insidious Quebecois plots to
| annex Prince Edward Island or whatever actual issues are
| happening in Canada.
| ben_w wrote:
| Before I deliberately locked myself out of it (well
| before Musk), I asked for my data.
|
| 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
|
| Other than the age (I'm neither under 13 nor between
| 55-64), everything I've listed is incorrect.
|
| On that basis, they'd probably call me a Republican.
|
| Carries a different meaning when you're British, that
| name does.
| tedivm wrote:
| I'm a guy in my 30s but they had me classified as a 65+
| year old woman. They also thought I was a radiologist.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I thought it was interesting that twitter thinks the U.S is
| the world
| whatgoodisaroad wrote:
| For a big tech company, the regulatory regime is the
| world. For Twitter that's the US.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Exactly. I don't see NPA (no party affiliation) anywhere.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Did you not get the memo? "If you're not with us, you're
| against us".
|
| 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
| stouset wrote:
| I _suspect_ that these are used for metrics tracking rather
| than being fed back into the recommendation engine. But there
| 's no real way to know for sure given the limited release.
| These predicates aren't actually used anywhere in the code
| that's been made available.
| 6nf wrote:
| So many questions. How are users tagged D or R? Is that a
| manual process or automated somehow? What is the effect of
| these tags? Can I find out if my Twitter account is in one of
| those buckets?
| abracadaniel wrote:
| And how are they choosing to balance them, per capita, or
| just both sides should get 50%? It seems pretty clear they
| are making editorial decisions here. Does that break their
| section 230 protections?
| astrange wrote:
| "Section 230 protections" have nothing to do with
| "editorial decisions"
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Please read something. Preferably section 230, which is
| short. Alternatively something entirely different, as
| long as that keeps you occupied.
| krapp wrote:
| >It seems pretty clear they are making editorial
| decisions here. Does that break their section 230
| protections?
|
| No.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-
| referre...
| [deleted]
| smegger001 wrote:
| you could probably algorithmically determine it in most
| cases based on any number of indicators from phrases used,
| to communities interacted with, which hashtages are
| included, which cohort retweets and likes most etc... thats
| not even getting into simply tagging political figures with
| the party they officially affiliate themselves with
| moffkalast wrote:
| Especially for people that aren't... you know.. Americans.
|
| Unless they mean actual public figure party members which
| are known and probably verified.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Facebook guesses your political affiliation as well, you can
| even look uber your settings to see what they guessed.
| krapp wrote:
| The repo suggests it's about tracking engagement metrics[0],
| so Team Red people see more Team Red content and vice versa.
| Nothing nefarious.
|
| [0]https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| minimaxir wrote:
| Having a separate flag to track engagement specifically for
| Elon tweets isn't nefarious, but _weird_.
| jeron wrote:
| You say it's not nefarious but isn't that how echo chambers
| are created?
| krapp wrote:
| I don't believe echo chambers are nefarious - there's no
| hidden agenda involved with them. That's just how
| recommendation algorithms work, and it's what most people
| want.
|
| But if someone finds some code that suppresses
| recommendations from a specific political ideology across
| the board, _that_ would be nefarious, IMO.
| thfuran wrote:
| Echo chambers may not be nefarious, but they are
| insidious.
| krapp wrote:
| They can be if they're involuntary and inescapable, but
| neither is the case for Twitter. It's designed around
| letting you curate your own feed, but it also constantly
| throws random stuff in through retweets and quote tweets
| - which is what people hate the most about the platform.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I don't believe discrimination is nefarious - there is no
| hidden agenda involved. That's just how societies work,
| it's natural behaviour - to belong to a group they
| identify with and to keep out strangers and weirdos.
| kodah wrote:
| This comment likely violates the guidelines both in form
| and content.
| krapp wrote:
| I don't believe repeating someone's comment nearly
| verbatim is as clever as you want it to be, nor do I
| believe recommendation algorithms are equivalent to the
| kinds of societal discrimination you allude to, nor would
| any reasonable person.
|
| Instead of trying very hard to be clever, please next
| time try just as hard to make a valid point. I know it
| can be difficult when you think you smell karma in the
| water but do try.
| yazzku wrote:
| The echo chamber in your first point does the suppression
| in the second.
| tric wrote:
| Why specifically track political parties? Where is
| author_is_american? Or author_is_mayonnaise_enjoyer?
|
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| Twitter became a very politically charged platform after
| 2016, mainly among Americans. They'd be idiots not to
| take advantage of that.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| The point is probably to check that changes they make
| aren't accidentally politically biased.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| I wonder who's on the "VIT" (Very Important Tweeter) list?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| People like Ben Shapiro, Glenn Greenwald, @catturd2
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Right wing high engagement accounts. Through in one or two
| accounts like @AOC for "balance"
| coolspot wrote:
| BTW: How @aoc got three-letter handle?
| minimaxir wrote:
| There's a few: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-
| news/twitter-vi...
| culi wrote:
| what is vits? private val DarkRequestAnnotation
| = "clnt/has_dark_request" private val Democrats =
| "democrats" private val Republicans = "republicans"
| private val Elon = "elon" private val Vits = "vits"
| nanidin wrote:
| Very Important Tweeters, a play on VIP perhaps?
| stefanos82 wrote:
| Very Important Tweets, I presume?
| mshafrir wrote:
| Very Important Tweeters
| commandlinefan wrote:
| At first I thought this post was a joke - and it was actually a
| pretty good joke. Yikes.
| schemescape wrote:
| Did they not expect people to notice suspicious code like this?
|
| Or did they leave this in just so they could hold its removal
| up as an example of listening to the community?
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| Could be that those in charge of preparing this open sourced
| repository did it begrudgingly, and so they perceived the
| fact that it looked bad as a positive thing. "Hey, you wanted
| us to release the code. Happy now?"
| dmix wrote:
| Why are you assuming this knowledge is harmful to them? What
| do you think it means for their business?
|
| No other social media platform will have this sort of
| accountability and public pressure to be better like having
| their recommendation algorithms public.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The full list of model features in that file is interesting.
|
| 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)
| qyph wrote:
| Those aren't redundant or collinear though? Maybe you are
| surprised they didn't encode this as an integer "num_images"?
| It is fairly common to one hot encode ordinal variables with
| only a few common/possible values this way.
| minimaxir wrote:
| True, it still seems odd to encode an explicitly ordinal
| variable as categorical (particularly one with a small
| finite range, in contrast to the follower logarithmic
| bucket ones), but Twitter's layout is weird enough that it
| could be a impactful difference in terms of engagement.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| This is (weirdly) common in production ML codebases
| written by software engineers. Like you, I have no idea
| why unless it's a memory optimisation (where you count 4+
| as many).
| ladon86 wrote:
| Having every column as a boolean (0/1) means you can
| treat it as a bitmap. As an (entirely fictional) example,
| imagine if you wanted to get the features of a thread
| instead of a single tweet. You could do it as a union of
| all the tweets:
|
| threadFeatures = tweet1 | tweet2 | tweet2
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Ok that makes lots of sense from an engineering
| perspective. It's pretty insane from a statistical
| perspective though, which I think was the original point.
| sschueller wrote:
| Well someone just asked about it in the live spaces[1] Elon is
| hosting and he said that should not be there. An engineer said
| afterwards it is just for metrics but then Elon chimed in again
| and said "we should get rid of it, it should be gone."
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1641880448061120513?s=20
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Doesn't necessarily mean he didn't want it there in the first
| place. Why else would it be there?
| JoshCole wrote:
| There are millions of lines of code existent. There are
| thousands added. Your prior for it being Elon's addition
| should be something like 10,000/1,000,000 or roughly 1/100.
| The prior that it wasn't Elon's change is going to be
| something like 99/100.
|
| When you add the additional information that Elon wants the
| code removed, but existing Twitter engineers think it
| appropriate to keep this actually increases the 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.
| jsnell wrote:
| Why is lines of code the appropriate input here? Here's a
| different computation that is at least as plausible:
|
| There are hundreds of millions of users. Let's say 300M.
| Only a single one is special-cased in this code: the
| narcisistic CEO who reportedly went ballistic when his
| engagement metrics went down. The prior that it's a
| change done in response to his demands is
| 299999999/300000000.
|
| (But of course it was added 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.)
| [deleted]
| XorNot wrote:
| Of course he did because it makes him look bad and he's
| desperate for praise and attention.
|
| 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.
| CathalMullan wrote:
| Only used for metrics, apparently. [0] /**
| * 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. */
|
| [0]: https://github.com/twitter/the-
| algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
| roughly wrote:
| I expect they're tracking the red team/blue team metrics
| because of the political shitstorm that's been the GOP's
| assertions they're being silenced by The Algorithm.
| panarky wrote:
| The fallacy of false equivalence systematized in code.
|
| Now one side can spew as much disinfo and incitement to
| violence as it likes, and any algorithm change that
| prevents this shit from getting amplified will be rejected
| as bias.
|
| BSaaS = Both Sides as a Service
| eldritch_4ier wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| willdr wrote:
| What are you talking about? Do you remember January 6?
| eldritch_4ier wrote:
| Yes, the one single right wing riot of the last 50 odd
| years (and everyone promptly clear out at curfew, with
| the 1 death being from a jumpy cop shooting a stupid
| rioter).
|
| Do you remember the dozens who died and the billions in
| damage of the BLM riots? The actual insurrections in
| Portland and Seattle?
| panarky wrote:
| Everybody remembers January 6 except those who want to
| pretend it didn't happen.
|
| How many remember the floods of Twitter incitement to hit
| the gas in their F-150 trucks to run over protesters, and
| then how many people actually perpetrated vehicle
| attacks?
| JackAndJack wrote:
| What about Jan 6th? People walking around in people's
| house lead by police?
| zeven7 wrote:
| I clicked downvote before reading the whole comment. At
| first I thought you were talking about the red team when
| you started with "mass riots and violence..." Then I read
| the rest of your comment and still felt just as good
| about my downvote. This isn't a constructive comment no
| matter what "side" you're on.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| "Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and
| no country can succeed--and no republic can survive. That
| is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for
| any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why
| our press was protected by the First Amendment-- the only
| business in America specifically protected by the
| Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not
| to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to
| simply "give the public what it wants"--but to inform, to
| arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our
| opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to
| lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public
| opinion." JFK
| regularjack wrote:
| "approved terminology".
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Well, technically they are looking for relative changes,
| not equal total exposures.
| sva_ wrote:
| Ahh, the group of Elons.
|
| I was wondering why I see so many tweets by him, and what his
| "Group's" impression quote is.
|
| This is actually pretty hilarious.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| Thankfully they haven't added a "no mute Elon" feature.
| Yet.
| nailer wrote:
| That's not how it works. See the parent.
| sva_ wrote:
| They said that they use it for metrics, so clearly there
| must be an "elon impression" metric.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| But who chooses the users to be metrics...
| mochomocha wrote:
| ... Metrics tracked in AB test. So even if it's not
| explicitly encoded in the algo (or implicitly through some of
| the features plugged in), they'll pick the winning cell as
| long as it doesn't hurt Elon's metrics (I'm just parroting
| the comment you quoted).
|
| 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]
| threeseed wrote:
| That lines up with reporting from Casey Newton a few days
| ago where a handful of VIPs e.g. Musk, LeBron James, AOC
| were being used as weather vanes to understand what the
| algorithm was doing.
|
| It definitely isn't just metrics. Any algorithm change that
| negatively affected Musk was clearly not going live.
| db48x wrote:
| Do you think the code looked like that prior to Elon's
| purchase? I suspect that there was another name there
| before.
|
| Separately, which of these groups do you think that they
| use as a control?
| threeseed wrote:
| > I suspect that there was another name there before
|
| 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.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| There is absolutely no reason to believe there was
| another Single user getting this treatment before. The
| Elon-case was just copy & pasted as an ego-stroking hack.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| i think he means trump, and i think it would've been
| strategically wise to give trump special treatment (tho
| probably not ideal)
| jefftk wrote:
| _> which of these groups do you think that they use as a
| control?_
|
| 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?
| [deleted]
| btown wrote:
| It's just a two-pass EM (Elon Maximization) algorithm!
| minimaxir wrote:
| The original code is a part of the home-mixer service, which
| is the "Main service used to construct and serve the Home
| Timeline."
|
| I suspect the flag corresponds to weights not present in the
| repo.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Update: Elon was asked about these in a Twitter Space, he says
| it's not appropriate and will be removed from the codebase.
|
| Additionally, from another Twitter engineer, the
| Democrat/Republican flags are apparently 10 years old and not
| important and do not have high feature importance.
| lhnz wrote:
| I think the decade old comment related to a different part of
| the code regarding the number of followers you have in
| relation to the number of accounts you follow. (Everybody on
| the call wants to remove this: I wonder why they haven't
| yet.)
| delecti wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence. In a sufficiently large system, you
| should be hesitant to remove things unless you're sure you
| know why it was added, and all the things that have come to
| depend on it since.
|
| 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.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Elon seems embarrassed: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1
| 641908130274525187?s=61...
|
| It'll be interesting to see what gets cut. Maybe just the
| Elon flag, but maybe others too.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| I read the code snippet before I saw the link and thought you
| were joking, but yeah, there really is an author_is_elon flag
| right there in the main branch.
| ibraheemdev wrote:
| > But we are deleting this bs. I only learned about it now!
| Will be gone by tomorrow.
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1641908130274525187?t=5t...
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| [dead]
| HAL3000 wrote:
| Expect to see A LOT more spam on Twitter after this release. It's
| like giving SEO spammers access to google search ranking
| algorithm.
| dmix wrote:
| Stuff like this always has consequences, it doesn't mean it's a
| net negative for society. It means you need to adapt and
| actually fix the problems, while also benefiting more from the
| accountability.
| dmix wrote:
| Stuff like this always has consequences, it doesn't mean it's a
| net negative for society. It means you need to adapt and
| actually fix the problems, while also benefiting more from the
| accountability.
|
| That's always been a risk of open source and not being hyper-
| centralized.
| Laaas wrote:
| Praise where praise is due. Wasn't completely sure whether they
| would in fact release it or keep posturing.
| bilekas wrote:
| I'm supposed to be going out in 20 mins....
| stusmall wrote:
| I thought it was an april fools joke when I saw this:
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/ci/ci.sh
|
| Like a dig at the code quality.
| endorphine wrote:
| Is it not?
| robopsychology wrote:
| Why are there two spaces instead of four in this Python code, it
| hurts my soul
| paulddraper wrote:
| I assume they copied it from Google.
|
| https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-use-2-spaces-for-Pytho...
| holler wrote:
| I guess they haven't read
| https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/#indentation
|
| "Use 4 spaces per indentation level."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Cost saving measure. This sort of emotionalism is why engineers
| need to kept out of the C-suite.
| SpEd3Y wrote:
| Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but if you're serious,
| I'm pretty sure the OP is talking metaphorically. It's just a
| slight annoyance he's not "emotional" about it.
|
| 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.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Space bloat.
| robopsychology wrote:
| How is it a cost saving measure? Or are you being sarcastic?
| Hard to tell over text!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yes, I'm joking. I also feel hurt by 2 space indents.
| robopsychology wrote:
| Hahaha I was sort of hoping you were an MBA who truly
| believed hitting 2 spaces instead of 4 spaces would save
| some sort of money at scale!
| tayo42 wrote:
| i think back in the day they copied googles python style guide
| Me1000 wrote:
| Squashing the commit history before releasing it was an
| interesting (and completely predictable) decision.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Squashing the commit history before releasing it was an
| interesting (and completely predictable) decision.
|
| This is standard practice when it comes to open-sourcing such
| repos that were closed-source for years.
| jkubicek wrote:
| It doesn't seem particularly interesting? I would never make a
| formerly private repo public without first erasing the history.
| There's no upside to showing everyone your work in progress and
| almost unlimited downsides.
| tapland wrote:
| There's no way everyone had the same weight in all the
| recommendation config files.
|
| It's not about hiding old work, but changes just before
| making it public.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| If they allowed you to git-blame the algorithm, some poor coder
| would have definitely gotten murdered by a crazy person who
| thought they purposely changed something to hurt them
| rschjosgknvx wrote:
| Hello Thursday
| [deleted]
| abalaji wrote:
| huh, legit open source too with 'Affero-GPL'
| madeofpalk wrote:
| AGPL is probably useless for any other site who'll want to use
| it, as it would require them to open source their site that
| uses it.
| joeyh wrote:
| Mastodon is conveniently also AGPL...
| [deleted]
| timeon wrote:
| On reason I use Mastodon is that there is just
| chronological timeline. Quick scroll and you are done. Bad
| for advertising platform - good for user.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I'm not sure why Mastodon would be interested in Twitters
| non-chronological timeline. It seems to be pretty
| antithetical to its goals.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Twitter also has a chronological timeline nowadays?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| muratsu wrote:
| Given the complex relationship between advertisers, platform, and
| users I don't know if any meaningful contribution can be made to
| the algorithm without pissing anyone off. The following tab
| already gave people who're not interested in algo recommendations
| a way out. I don't quite understand the reasoning behind open
| sourcing the algorithm. Any thoughts?
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Is it even what they use in production?
|
| There is code that favor Elon's tweets so I'd yes that's probably
| what they use
| 0l wrote:
| > There is code that favor Elon's tweets so I'd yes that's
| probably what they use
|
| Where?
| zaroth wrote:
| Spoiler - there isn't.
| ftxbro wrote:
| Yeah they track author_is_elon, author_is_democrat, and
| author_is_republican but they don't appear to be used for
| favoritism anywhere in this code.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Why do they exist then? No code references it, but that's
| Scala/JVM so many things depend on runtime
| initialization, so maybe some other systems do? wich
| ones?
|
| 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..
| ftxbro wrote:
| It's not used at run-time, it's in the repository so that
| the large language models that are training on the github
| corpus will know how special elon is, and so that the
| future code written for twitter by GPT-5 will take the
| hint and add the favoritism autonomously.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Interesting argument, and definitely worth defending; an
| AI that's biased by design to remember and preserve the
| old world order's members rule and influence
|
| Begs the question, why make it obvious?
| sho_hn wrote:
| Humorous conspiracy theory: Imagine if it is not, but
| sanitized, and then someone added in Elon Boost to make it look
| credible. :-)
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Or perhaps it does nothing at all, and it was there so we
| talk about it, the "is_democrat"/"is_republican" is also
| ridiculous, as if the goal was to demonstrate a point about
| social media in general, hmm
| quotemstr wrote:
| Typically, we expect to be able to run "open source" software
| ourselves. If you open-source your C compiler, I can compile a C
| program with it. In a few recent high-profile cases though,
| companies have "open sourced" ML systems without releasing the
| model weights. This practice is just like your releasing the
| builds scripts for your C compiler, but not the compiler itself.
| While more transparency from social media will be enlightening,
| calling a release like this (or LLaMA) "open source" feels like
| equivocation. I'd love to see more full releases, weights
| included.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| Running this code would require a lot more than just the
| exported models. There are a large number of code and system
| dependencies missing.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Of course --- but without the model parameters, even stubbing
| those systems would be useless. My point is that while this
| release gives the public some information about how Twitter
| ranks tweets, it doesn't tell the story because huge pieces
| of "the algorithm" are missing. For example: the NSFW
| classifier "open source" release doesn't tell us anything
| about what Twitter considers NSFW and what it doesn't.
| varjag wrote:
| _Rank each Tweet using a machine learning model._
|
| This does a lot of heavy lifting here.
| thieving_magpie wrote:
| There appears to be a repo for the-algorithm-ml:
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml
| Thaxll wrote:
| Let's dig into Twitter code quality.
| Kpourdeilami wrote:
| https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
|
| ```
|
| 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.")
|
| ```
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Looking through it, the ... seems to be a placeholder for
| information they'd prefer to be kept private. For example,
| look in the keywords section in the same file you shared.
| Kpourdeilami wrote:
| You're correct, makes more sense now
| ryanisnan wrote:
| I want to go back to a world where there isn't an algorithm
| feeding me what someone "thinks" I want to read.
|
| 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".
| simonsarris wrote:
| This is pretty limited. I picked a term used in the diagram to
| see what I could find out about it. But there seems to be _next
| to nothing_ in the released code about the mentioned "author
| diversity". No real code or description.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think the relevant part of the code is in this other repo:
|
| 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
| bagels wrote:
| "Written by the Twitter Team"
|
| 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.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| No one wants to go to jail for Elon, who has been flagrantly
| violating FTC orders.[1] There's a good chance the commit
| history and authors may attest to that.
|
| https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3928219-musk-was-denie...
| voz_ wrote:
| hmmm https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atwitter%2Fthe-
| algorithm-m...
|
| Twitter hmu if you need help trying Pytorch 2.0 ;)
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Astounding amount of cynicism here, so I'll say something
| positive: Transparency is undoubtly important, I'm glad we can
| see how all of this works and what sort of effort goes into
| building a social media system. It's licensed under GPL which is
| a bummer (would have preferred BSD) but it's better than nothing.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Astounding amount of cynicism here
|
| 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Yea I mean, all discussions about Twitter have double
| standards. If this was literally any other company, there
| would be resounding praise.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Assuming anything in this codebase is worth reusing, I'm glad
| it's GPL. It's a case where I'd like open-first to spread.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| GPL would be good if it is a self contained library. If
| anyone would use it, it would be small portions of it, but
| GPL makes it completely useless. You can't contaminate
| anything with it. We'll stare at it, that's about it.
|
| 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).
| sho_hn wrote:
| It's only contaminating other components where you
| incorporate or link it. If it's e.g. a microservice that's
| fine.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Good point about network calls & GPL licenseability.
| anderspitman wrote:
| I'm not opposed to social media feeds having complex
| recommendation algorithms. I just wish they allowed you to opt in
| to a reverse chronological feed of only people you follow, like
| RSS.
| infogulch wrote:
| Twitter has this now. The home page is split into two tabs:
| "For you", the algorithmic feed, and "Following", the reverse
| chronological feed of just who you follow.
| conradfr wrote:
| Is really "Following" the entire chronological feed? I feel I
| miss tweets from people I follow that actually appears in the
| "For You" tab.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's not. I follow a fairly small # of people (~500) and
| getting people to reliably show up in is a long-running
| problem. Following is not enough, you have to favorite or
| somehow interact with them sufficiently to be sure of
| seeing all their tweets. It's quite annoying.
| cubefox wrote:
| Are you sure? I didn't notice something like this.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Very sure. I started noticing the issue a couple of years
| ago (well before Musk's arrival) because I'd find myself
| thinking 'I haven't seen anything from ____ in a while, I
| should follow that person', only to discover that I was
| already following them and their tweets were just not
| showing up. New follows will generally pop up reliably,
| but if someone has fallen out of your regular feed you
| have to work to put them back into it.
|
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| That was the great thing with the 3rd party client, I
| could trust that all the people I followed I would get
| their actual tweets. Every single one of them. There was
| no also messing with it, no tweet "liked" by someone
| else, etc. Who I followed is what I saw, nothing less,
| nothing more.
|
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| It seems the only reason why people wouldn't show up then
| is that they got shadow banned or at least have some
| deboosting applied. So the algorithm thinks they are
| spam?
| BbzzbB wrote:
| It always had it.
|
| 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.
| LiquidPolymer wrote:
| On my "following" tab (on the phone app) , I'm still getting
| recommendations for bomb throwers I don't follow. Am I weird?
| It's like an unhinged relative. Not pleasant.
|
| Edit: I reversed "for you" and "following" in my original
| reply.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I sometimes get these as push notifications with my
| username added to them.
| valarauko wrote:
| I find these notifications so confusing - at first glance
| they look like DMs or mentions to me. I don't follow
| these people, nor were they RT by anybody I know.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Probably lots of engagement due to that confusion though.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Twitter has _always_ had "chronological timeline" behind a
| confusing "sparkle" button (except for a brief period a few
| months back where they removed it, or always defaulted to
| back to algo timeline? and then restored it a week later)
|
| They called it "Latest Tweets" https://web.archive.org/web/20
| 200205092104/https://help.twit...
| dmonitor wrote:
| immediately getting rid of the sparkle button is one of the
| few reasons i still have a small amount of faith in elon's
| vision of twitter
| Laaas wrote:
| - Open sourcing this
|
| - 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.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| The spam comment is interesting. I had a sharp uptick in
| the number of spam messages after the acquisition.
| dmix wrote:
| My daily DM spam hit a peak last year than dropped in
| recent months.
| astrange wrote:
| There's not any less spam. How could there be when he
| laid off all the antispam people?
|
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > - Lists as tabs
|
| 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.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| Not having to login to Twitter is a great feature. I
| don't have a Twitter account, but often see posts linked
| elsewhere, and hated getting hit to login each time.
| cubefox wrote:
| That wasn't the same, clicking the sparkle button still
| included a lot of recommended tweets. The only effect was
| that it made the timeline chronological and included all
| tweets from people you follow.
| spike021 wrote:
| It doesn't always stay on whatever you last used, though. I
| mostly use Following but it always inevitably ends up back on
| "For you".
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| If Twitter was 'dead' why on earth are we still talking so much
| about this blue bird site?
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35213213
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33701371
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Are you kidding me, running a botnet is easier than it has been
| in years if you're that way inclined. The amount of spam I see
| has gone way up over the last 6 months.
| Reptur wrote:
| They didn't open source the data the censoring abusive, toxicity,
| and nsfw the algorithms check against, so I'd call it a partial
| open-sourcing.
| frob wrote:
| Well that was a giant nothing-burger. This seems to be your
| standard ranking stack. We find candidates based on who you
| follow, who they follow, who is trending, and what we think you
| like. We then rank them based on how likely you are to engage
| with them and continue to come back and give us money via our
| subscription service and ad views. We then try to remove spam and
| other negative experiences.
|
| Where's the beef?
| evntdrvn wrote:
| it would be super interesting if when logged in to Twitter, you
| could take a look at your current calculated scores/weights for
| all the params that are part of these algorithms. Similar to the
| Netflix "Stats for nerds" menu...
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Repo has 1.5% rust code and no author_is_uwu
|
| That is the biggest problem.
| inparen wrote:
| Issue list is growing rapidly for a repo created an hour ago.
| ThalesX wrote:
| Non-issues most of them:
|
| - 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...
| Egoist wrote:
| Aaaand the issues turned into a shitpost
| HeckFeck wrote:
| In fairness they could save some RAM by rewriting it in Rust 6
| or 7 times.
| [deleted]
| ranboxtest wrote:
| April Fools prank at it's finest...
| thumbsup-_- wrote:
| The barebones ReadMe makes me feel this repository was open-
| sourced against the wish of engineers and with a top down
| directive
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| How so? More details and reasoning?
| thumbsup-_- wrote:
| Elon?
| [deleted]
| danso wrote:
| > _Twitter has several Candidate Sources that we use to retrieve
| recent and relevant Tweets for a user. For each request, we
| attempt to extract the best 1500 Tweets from a pool of hundreds
| of millions through these sources. We find candidates from people
| you follow (In-Network) and from people you don't follow (Out-of-
| Network)._
|
| > _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"
| cubefox wrote:
| Perhaps if you did follow so many people they got drowned out,
| but with substantially fewer following, those recommended
| tweets were a big part of what I saw. Especially in the last
| year or so before Musk took over: Twitter went a lot more
| aggressive and didn't just show tweets which people you follow
| "liked", but also other tweets, which the algorithm somehow
| determined you might like, which was often wrong, and,
| moreover, so frequent that it made a big portion of the
| timeline. The "following" tab fixed this problem.
| danso wrote:
| Yep, having had created a few throwaway accounts I definitely
| got a sense of how the algorithm compensated for the majority
| of users who aren't super active. And it makes sense -- most
| new users aren't going to want to spend account creation
| picking 50 accounts to follow.
|
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| Is the "following" tab an option for you? Or what would you
| like the "for you" tab to do? Filter out heavy tweeters?
| Prioritize more popular tweets?
| danso wrote:
| The Following tab limits to my followers, but in reverse
| chrono order. This is also not desirable b/c it limits to
| whoever's posting whenever I've happened to check the
| feed.
|
| I'd like to see interesting tweets from a few hours ago,
| and not just Australian tweets when I'm up late at night.
| coldcode wrote:
| A year ago my account with 5700 followers got an average of
| 3000 impressions per post (art). Today it's only 200-500. It
| mentions their fanout system was replaced by something new, not
| sure when or if thats in the drop, but my impression count
| dropped around April-May last year. Clearly something decided
| my posts should not shown to my followers very often.
| yeahsure22 wrote:
| [dead]
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