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>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications

• jdofaz 6y ago
  I really disliked that "feature", I usually use the chronological mode to avoid seeing them. If I wanted to see that content I would follow it, and if I wasn't and the content was good someone I follow might retweet it. And if I follow someone who retweets annoying things I can disable retweets on that person.
  • grishka 6y ago
    The chronological mode doesn't help either. That's the reason why I keep using half-broken third-party clients on mobile and Tweetdeck on desktop. If I wanted to "discover" or "explore" something, I'd open the dedicated section, thank you very much. Modern social media is ridiculously user-hostile.
• yamrzou 6y ago
  Their recommendation engine is not harmful in all cases. I used to use Twitter to follow some machine learning/programming profiles and remember the recommendations being quite good.
  • core-questions 6y ago
    This is the amazing duality of social networking: as soon as it becomes topic specific, the quality of discussion improves in direct corellation to how technical the topic gets. The moment the conversation is just general babble, anonymous / pseudonymous people will find things to argue about.
    • majewsky 6y ago
      > As soon as [social networking] becomes topic specific, the quality of discussion improves in direct corellation to how technical the topic gets. "5G spreads the coronavirus" "Measles vaccines cause autism" "10 scientific proofs why the earth is flat"
      • core-questions 6y ago
        I mean topic specific in the sense of finding places where deep discussions are being had - like, say, a mailing list or forum for a very particular thing, scientific or programming or cars or whatever you like. Not what you see on Facebook. Social networking is not just FAANG, look in the long tail for the good stuff.
    • meheleventyone 6y ago
      I sadly don’t find this to be true. The caustic subjects in all disciplines get talked about more and recommended more. I made the mistake of watching some flight videos and now get recommended crash montages all the time. I watched the C++ con talk on “OO considered harmful” and now have an inordinate amount of bullshit in my feed. It feels kind of crazy that my YouTube recommendations took such a downturn suddenly.
      • core-questions 6y ago
        I will clarify: I don't mean that _feeds_ are doing well with this. I just mean, when you dig down to a place where Real Discussion is happening, like a web1.0 message board or group or whatever, there's still tons of good, good-faith discussion happening. It's just not the stuff that percolates up to the top. Relying on your feed recommendations for your content is like living off of nothing but McDonalds, it's not good for you.
  • gautamnarula 6y ago
    Any recommendations on whom to follow on that front?
    • yamrzou 6y ago
      In no specific order: - Andrej Karpathy - Jeremy Howard - François Chollet - Adam Paszke - Thomas Kipf - Sebastian Ruder - Julia Evans - Martin Kleppmann
  • notatoad 6y ago
    in my experience, if anybody you follow ever interacts with anything political, that quickly drowns out any other interesting content in the recommendations. If you exclusively follow people who exclusively post and interact with programming content, then maybe your recs will be okay. but all it takes is one person in your network to interact with one other topic to poison your recommendations for good.
• gotodengo 6y ago
  >"we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks" This is my recurring issue when I see most "changes we're making for the election" posts. Sure this seems like a good step for this election. Fake news and the destabilization it can bring isn't just an American phenomenon though. Are they going to apply these precautions to elections in Brazil, or Myanmar?
  • bredren 6y ago
    Many people will stop watering their lawns during a drought. But they usually start up again after it passes.
    • panopticon 6y ago
      I'm not sure if this statement is supportive of Twitter's decision or opposing the practice of not using drought-resistant landscaping.
      • bredren 6y ago
        People do things for themselves that to others appear wrong and unnecessarily self self-serving. When presented with major societal issues some people are reasonable enough to trim it back until the crisis has subsided. I think Twitter and Facebook’s coddling enablement of President Trump has been disgusting and both companies have morally bankrupt business models. But in 2020, you no sooner can demand your neighbor not keep a lush green lawn than you can a social network not run an ad network. At least this pattern of making the change when it is having its worst impact is better than no change at all.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
    • waheoo 6y ago
      So?
  • animationwill 6y ago
• MarkSweep 6y ago
  Nothing shows Twitter’s contempt for their users like the “Show less often” button on these sorts of notifications.
• cameldrv 6y ago
  I’ve noticed that they’ve replaced this with surfacing tweets from your lists. This is really annoying to me as I’ve moved political follows to a politics list so that I’m not inundated with politics and have to explicitly check the list to see that content. Now I get it all the time.
• nullc 6y ago
  > but i don't see how they can square "This makes us money but harms the world as a side effect, but if we harm it too much the retaliation will cost us money. As a result we're going to only use it as much as we think we can get away with."
  • pjc50 6y ago
    https://mobile.twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?la... "turning a big dial that says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right"
• vmception 6y ago
  Easy, because the blog post wasnt for you, it was for shareholders, advertisers and bot farms.
  • munk-a 6y ago
    This is the truth. However, bringing attention to it and shaming them over it is still worthwhile since, while their actions are in line with the desire of their customers, it's contrary to the desire of the majority of their user base.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  Squaring it is pretty easy, I think. Recommendation engines are neither inherently good or harmful -- think of them as an amplifier. In normal times, they work pretty well -- it gives you more of the stuff you like, which usually isn't harmful. Just entertaining/fluff/interesting/whatever. But closer to an election, they can be gamed and weaponized for harm -- Russia can activate botnets, fake accounts, etc. and lies spread like wildfire. So it's not about whether the recommendation engine is good or bad -- it works. The point is that close to an election, bad actors weaponize it 1,000x more or more often than they do the rest of the time, so they're turning it off. When it's not being weaponized so much, they can keep it on. It's like paying for a DDoS protection layer at times when you know your site is likely to be attacked, but not using it the rest of the time.
  • meheleventyone 6y ago
    It seems hilariously naive to think that the only time people will be weaponising it is during an election and that there aren’t elections happening regularly all over the world so that if your point holds true such things should basically always be turned off.
    • jayd16 6y ago
      They didn't say that though. They're saying the consequences are worse before an election. At other times the pros outweigh the cons. Not sure I agree but its a pretty reasonable argument, I think.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    > When it's not being weaponized so much, they can keep it on. Clearly you understand the recommendation engine is being weaponised at all times. So why are you also trying to defend it? As others have pointed out, Twitters motivation is entirely composed of two motivating factors: financial and cover-your-arse.
  • williamdclt 6y ago
    > But closer to an election, they can be gamed and weaponized for harm But there's elections all the time. There's many different elections in the US alone, any many many more throughout the world. And elections are just one thing, what about influence over opinions for bills/law/reforms? Wars? Public opinion about basically any subject, from economics to gender/race/class tensions? If you accept that social media is weaponised for this election, it seems naive to not accept it is being weaponised absolutely all the time
• acituan 6y ago
  > I want to applaud this, because it's clearly a good move. It’s not that clear to me that this is a net good move. Exposure to out-network content, depending on what is exposed, could be good for preventing echo chambers and confirmation bias too. Twitter likely went the other direction and promoted out-network tweets that only increased engagement, and blaming the feature itself for this is naive at best. Second issue everyone seems to be missing is the potential partisan-ness of these feature changes. Do the usage of any individual feature distribute equally among all demographics? If not, feature-shaping a near election could be construed as an underhanded way to hamper the discourse of certain demographics. Of course this is very easy to dismiss as conspiratorial thinking, but I think ideally any intellectually honest discourse engine would have gone the extra mile to demonstrate the neutrality of their election specific changes.
  • throwaway316943 6y ago
    I find it suspect that they are giving as one of their criteria for calling the election as two authoritative news sources independently calling it. If this were non partisan they would have at least said a majority of authoritative sources or some other consensus.
    • reaperducer 6y ago
      Then you run into the problem of "What is authoritative?" By limiting it to just two, Twitter can say, "We like these guys. They're reputable." Instead of having to line up and vet thousands of other sources, and task people with monitoring all those thousands of authoritative sources around the world.
      • iso947 6y ago
        I’ve never understood the dewy beats Truman calling system. In the UK each constituency announces results after being counted (and recounted). Those results arrive during the night, polls close at 10, first results at 11, a good idea of who will win in most elections by 5, andthe last few results might stretch into 9 or 10 am if ferries are having issues. But aside from a national exit poll at 10pm, there are no real guesses. It seems that different US elections predict who will win a given state far earlier in the process - before the votes are counted even the first time. Is that right? My own global broadcaster takes its “calls” from ABC. I think that abc, nbc, cbs, Fox, cnn, New York Times and Washington post are probably good enough for “calling it”. I was working election night 2012 in our Washington office and was shocked how early the “Obama wins” straps went up -I have a photo at just 23:19 eastern from fox saying Obama was re-elected. That’s something like 4 hours before polls close in Alaska and Hawaii! If 4 of those networks and papers have called it then it’s likely good. Sure there’s buzzfeed and whatever that may have enough professional staff on to really judge it, but it’s unlikely that 3 networks and a major paper are all going to call Dewy rather than Truman.
• ValentineC 6y ago
  >>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets. I don't know if a Twitter PM will read this, but showing Likes in my feed — and not having an option to turn it off in the official mobile app client — is one big reason I stopped consuming tweets. It's a shame that the only way to opt out of seeing Likes is by using a third-party client.
  • danudey 6y ago
    This, and other timeline muddling they've done, are the reasons I use third-party clients like Tweetbot almost exclusively (other than when clicking a link opens the official app). The thing that irritates me the most is that they also seem to track the last time you logged in via the Twitter website or official client, and show me "while you were gone" tweets that it thinks I might be interested in. Typically, they're right - so right, in fact, that I've often already replied to them. I've always said (until Twitter went full asshole, which they're now reversing course on) that I'd pay for a "Twitter Pro". Let me use a third-party client to do everything that the official client does, but with the option of turning things off - provide likes in my timeline, which my client can filter out; allow me to access polls via the API (which presumably they don't do for everyone because of botting), and so on. Twitter, I will pay you monthly to stop making me choose between an incomplete experience (third-party clients) and an awful one (inflexible first-party clients). It's guaranteed income. Please, sign me up.
    • colejohnson66 6y ago
      I don’t understand why social media companies don’t offer a paid tier. They don’t have to charge everyone as they’d lose the vast majority of users, but for those who want to pay, why prevent them? They’d be making more money than they do from ads.
  • tomjakubowski 6y ago
    You can tap the sparkly icon on the feed and change to "Latest Tweets".
• jayd16 6y ago
  >how they can square I don't think its that illogical to argue there's a time sensitive component. False news is the price you pay for breaking news sometimes. Its fine in the long run, but the argument is during an election the risk is too great.
  • jariel 6y ago
    "False news is the price you pay for breaking news" It has nothing to do with 'breaking news' it's just people lying, which they will do all the time.
• baud147258 6y ago
  being able to hide the “liked by” (and "replied to") tweets is the only reason I'm still using Twitter at all
• jonas21 6y ago
  Do you also find it hard to square the statement "large gatherings are dangerous enough for spreading diseases that we need to ban them for public safety" with "we're gonna have them again when the pandemic is over"?
• nonbirithm 6y ago
  > we are removing them because we don’t believe the “Like” button provides sufficient, thoughtful consideration prior to amplifying Tweets to people who don’t follow the author of the Tweet, or the relevant topic that the Tweet is about It's amusing that it took the election for them to finally admit this. I had thought much the same thing of Twitter's recommendations for a long time. People discussing divisive political issues shows up on my feed a lot, despite deliberate curation of who I follow, just because the people whose personal work I appreciate also happen to participate in political discussions in addition to posting their work, so the issues they "like" get posted on my feed. All of the posts they liked were from accounts I had no interest in following. Personally this change would cut down on the signal to noise ratio for me. I am thinking they had to balance the improvement in their metrics for engagement they would gain by putting more novel out of network tweets in view, and the virtol and divisiveness the election-related media and misinformation propagating further would inevitably cause. Yes, there is not enough "sufficient, thoughtful consideration" put into the recommendations, but if they ultimately increase Twitter's user engagement and revenue then it takes a lot of effort to backtrack on them. It also makes me continue to believe that some kinds of information are detrimental in some ways, and Twitter is now controlling the flow of that information as to prevent public backlash or some other harm.