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> Machine learning enables Twitter to drive engagement, surface content most relevant to our users, and promote healthier conversations. One that wants to mani
by llao 8y ago
> Machine learning enables Twitter to drive engagement, surface content most relevant to our users, and promote healthier conversations.
One that wants to manipulate your mind, one that echochambers your discovery, one that censors arbitrarily.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Karunamon 8y agoI’m not even sort of interested in what Twitter’s heavy-handed definition of “healthy conversations” are. I dare say they’re acting well outside of their wheelhouse. Their job is to provide a platform for discussion, not whatever that mess of corpspeak I just read is.
- pteredactyl 8y agoThose 3000 employees need to justify their jobs. What better way than program a robot to decide what 'healthy conversations' are. Dorsey's capitulation to the complaint army over his recent chicken sandwich says it all. I do see the hate mobs calming down ( or being ignored ), eventually, but when that happens we know Dorsey and a lot of these CEOs have little or no backbone.
- xxpor 8y agoTheir job is make money. The sense of entitlement people have about social media is just wild.
- mindcrime 8y agoJust to play Devil's advocate: One that wants to manipulate your mind Like your post here? Or my present reply to it? And so on... one that echochambers your discovery Which is good, because nobody has enough time in the day to process every conceivable byte of information they might stumble across... one that censors arbitrarily OK, because while everyone may have the right to speak freely, not all speech needs to be heard by everyone...
- pteredactyl 8y agoThe idea is I have a timeline and am able to choose what's on it. Good, bad, ugly. It's up to me. If I don't like what someone's saying I unfollow, mute or block. Easy. With Twitter, FB, and modern social media, they let their algorithm decide what I should see. They think they know what people want and ultimately what's best for me. I disagree with this so I opt-out of their services. Sadly. Because there are ( or were ) a lot of interesting and novel voices on there. Also, I suppose at a certain point those 3XXX employees need to justify their existence. And yes it's their prerogative to do whatever they want with their product. And yes I know private companies are not bound by the 1st Amendment.
- xnxn 8y ago> Easy. If you're spectating, maybe. Completely falls apart when you try to engage in dialogue on Twitter, which is what both Twitter, Inc. and I want. Say I follow someone because I like what they say. And I want to discuss what they're saying, or to explore existing discussions. I'm going into this ready to have a thoughtful debate or two. So I open the replies, and they're what I consider to be garbage: flamewars, reaction GIFs, propaganda, straight-up bad-faith trolling, and worse. But maybe there's some good in here somewhere? Assume I'm a typical human with emotions and stuff. Do I: A) Immediately close the thread! It's not worth it, and I have the ability and willpower to bow out. B) Scroll through the replies, muting and blocking people. Maybe if I do this enough I'll have a nicer experience on the next thread I open. Wow there sure are a lot of these folks! C) Take the bait. Someone is wrong on the internet. You know already, but I'll tell you anyway. I, typical human, tend to rush headlong into option C), which wastes my time, makes me unhappy, and gives me a negative perception of the quality of discussions on Twitter. Twitter, Inc. doesn't want that either, but they've picked these replies to show me. Clearly they don't know what kind of thing I think is garbage. So what can they do? It's not easy.
- pteredactyl 8y agoReplies with the most upvotes are at the top. That generally filters out the BS. There is a date posted versus upvote count balance that needs to be reached, but ML is not required. And this all assumes you're trying to have conversation around someone with many many followers. If you're in a small circle, none of your argument applies. Further posts by the original poster are at the top too. Yes, you may have to filter through some posts on your own. If you plan on having a conversation with Obama, good luck. And for good reason. But I don't want Twitter Inc filtering for me. Essentially upvoting and downvoting comments based on their algorithm. Sorry. At least give users the choice to use their ML algorithm or not. I'd even pay to have it turned off or to tweak how I see my timeline. So I don't follow.
- contravariant 8y agoI thought I was about to read some satire based on that quote. Turns out it's not.
- primordialsoup 8y agoI suppose the same applies to many other ML products? Like Netflix's recommendations, Amazon's suggestions and almost all the ads you see these days? I agree that the problem exists, but its not just Twitter, and this is an unfortunate side-effect of recommendations in general: even if you do count-based recommendations, you are going to have a bit of echo chamber.
- kossae 8y agoThose two examples are fine applications of ML. The problem is when you're dealing with sequential, timestamped content that SHOULD be displayed in the order it was posted. I think companies should very judiciously apply ML in these cases, and only possibly for 'top stories' or huge events that are occurring. However it appears ML is being applied across the board, using multiple signals and throwing the chronological order of the content out of whack, which is very frustrating.
- dirkgently 8y agoDo you remember hiw bad YouTube comments have been? And it's significantly better lately? That happened due to ML. Not everyone is out there to use ML for nefarious purpose. And there are multiple use cases for ML.
- bthrm 8y agoHow are yt comments any better now?
- dirkgently 8y agoIt's not perfect, but it's way better. The spam is mostly gone. Inane comments are lower in priority.
- burkaman 8y agoThey are now mostly real people organically being morons, as opposed to mostly bots spamming other channels and a bunch of stick figure chain mail.
- bitmapbrother 8y agoIn addition to ML a lot of people are reporting offensive comments. If you care about your account then you should perhaps think twice.
- dominotw 8y agooh wow you are right. I actually participate in youtube comments now, i used to completely ignore them. Thats a beautiful example of ML.
- blauditore 8y agoAt least for music videos, comments are still pretty shitty. It feels like more than half of them are one of the following patterns: - "Like if you're watching in June 2018?" [2k upvotes] - "Most underrated artist of our time" [5k upvotes] - "Wow, mad respect for <artist>" (written by verified account by other artist trying to promote their own content)
- partiallypro 8y agoIf Twitter ever moves to a fully algorithmic timeline like Instagram (has annoying done), it will shrivel up and die. The linear timeline of Twitter is what makes Twitter....Twitter. I've noticed a lot lately that more and more I see tweets out of order because of the algorithms. I believe you can turn that off, but sometimes those are useful...but more often they are spam in the moment, especially if a big story has broken. I feel like it used to only occur when you first opened up Twitter, you'd see old highlights...now it feels like it's intertwined more...it's very annoying. Twitter is, by far, the most powerful and useful social media platform out there for information...I sure hope they aren't going to strangle it to death.
- thelastidiot 8y agoI second what you noticed. I now see myself with a WTF expression on my face when I am trying to figure out what happened with the linear timeline and all that junk I pretty much don't care about inserted in what I am interested to read. Feels like random ad inserts. Not good.
- insin 8y agoUnfortunately you can't turn off the algorithm which treats other people's favourites as if they were retweets, which makes me think twice about using the favourite feature at all. I know I've had stuff put into my feed which the person doing the favouriting would never have retweeted. I wrote an extension/user script to filter those - and retweets - out into their own lists on the front page [1], as I just want a chronological timeline of what people are saying now, which mustn't be "engaging" enough for Twitter's purposes. [1] https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement#readme https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement#readme
- ericd 8y agoML is like a genie in that it is very good at optimizing exactly what you tell it to, and so you need to think long and hard about what you're telling it to optimize, because it might turn out to be bad proxy for what you really wanted.
- malcolmgreaves 8y agoThis is a super insightful analogy! Thank you.
- recharged93 8y ago+1 ML requires you know exactly what you want. And not what you need... If you're not exact, disaster is imminent. Uber accident comes to mind. Yes, rolling stones reference too.
- ericd 8y agoSure, glad you liked it!
- jimbofisher1 8y agoThis is hardly unique to twitter. You don't this is happening at Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc...
- whywhywhywhy 8y agoMy timeline would be so much healthier if Twitter put me in charge of who shows up in it. After Google killed Reader I was forced to follow all the people who used to blog to keep up with their professional work. But especially in the last 3 years Twitter feeds have all come with a large side order of political hot takes that I have zero interest in sitting through. To counteract this I have an extensive word blocklist and turn off retweets on many people so my Twitter can remain about the work of interesting people in my industry and not just an open sewer of politics. Twitters insistence to show me posts that people I follow liked or engaged highly with bypasses all this.
- rado 8y agoSame here. Recently discovered the RSS reader Cappuccino (thanks HN) and so far it seems to fix the problem. It even syncs unread posts between Mac and iPad.
- deepnet 8y agoEmpowering users with Machine Learning, i.e. offering simple powerful ML based filtering tools for the Twitter user. More importantly allow opt out and configuration of stuffing feeds with politics and liked by those I follow. But the idea is not to empower users but masticate users to provide more 'value' to Advertisers by selling them 21stC version of 'hits' - the false & forced engagement metric. This all stems from the mentality that Twitter are serving the money not the user. It is short-termism. Hopefully crap-stuffing users will allowing the resurgence of a diverse market that necessitates open standards unlike our current hyper monopolies and their data silos.