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Chris Anderson of TED asked Elon a lot of the questions and concerns being discussed here. Check it out if you want to understand his perspective and goals with

• hooande 5y ago
  if the algorithm is open source, bad actors can see it as well. it'll become remarkably easy to spam and game the system. this could drive users away, decrease revenue and leave Mr. Musk holding a $40B hot potato
  • sgillen 5y ago
    Counter point, maybe it just accelerates the game of cat and mouse already played between bad actors and algorithm designers, possibly leading to faster iteration and improvement of their algorithm to find hard to fake signals.
    • ece 5y ago
      Musk could start his own Mastodon right now and do what he wants, but if he wants to bring along his Twitter network (or make it easier for any Twitter user to switch), then perhaps hurrying up Bluesky is another way to get what he wants short of taking Twitter private. It seems like the focus needs to be on what can fight back misinformation/spam better given the context: more speech or moderation. The need for human moderation will likely still exist, but if Musk wants to accelerate the process as you say, Bluesky seems like a good way to start. If Twitter is making choices that increase their bottom line at the expense of community, then absolutely, more transparency and open source would help with that.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • expensive_news 5y ago
      I feel like this is the outcome that would occur. Similar to how some of the most secure software is open-source (Linux).
  • basisword 5y ago
    Get rid of the algorithmic timeline and make everything chronological. Manipulation and gaming over.
    • ridaj 5y ago
      That would also get rid of users. It's pretty clear that chronological ordering is non-optimal for engagement in a feed system.
      • basisword 5y ago
        If Musk really cares about free speech, speech should be more important than user engagement and algorithms manipulate the visibility of speech. They should be the first thing to go.
        • ridaj 5y ago
          And revenue will shrink accordingly. If that's his plan, he's right that it can only happen in a private company. Otherwise the resulting revenue deceleration will send Twitter into a stock price self-fulfilling tailspin as stockholders start seeing it as a doomed platform.
    • 3pt14159 5y ago
      I just wish we would implement a system where users vouch for each other in order to use the platform. A sort of web-of-trust to stamp out (or at least temporarily punish) whole areas of the social graph that are being used for manipulation and abuse.
• nonethewiser 5y ago
  Those sound like great changes. I'd love to see the algorithm in its current state
  • rmatt2000 5y ago
    It's always the algorithm with you, isn't it Alan Turing?
  • robbomacrae 5y ago
    I agree it would be nice but it would also be a boon for bad actors who want to manipulate the system. Reddit now closely guards its algorithms (it didn't used to) to make it more difficult to game the system. For every honest curious developer who wants to vet the system, there are plenty more people out to spread miss-information.
    • ouid 5y ago
      reddit is not a paragon here
      • robbomacrae 5y ago
        I agree. Is anyone? Full disclosure: I used to work at Reddit. I was just putting in my 2 cents why Elon's proposal might not be immediately actionable without a lot of hard thought about how to deal with bad actors without the obscurity layer.
    • bradly 5y ago
      > I agree it would be nice but it would also be a boon for bad actors who want to manipulate the system. Has this ever happened, though? How is it different from giving hackers source code?
      • ChadNauseam 5y ago
        Yeah. The issues is that in the environment they work in, there are no known secure recommendation algorithms that give good recommendations. So the only option is security by obscurity.