10 ms·

Twitter Should Open Up the Algorithm

71 points by dshipper 4y ago

andrew_ 4y ago
Make moderation guidelines and moderation audit trails public and open.
- mdb31 4y ago
  Yes, like the lobste.rs moderation log. It's cute because, like, nobody cares.
- rco8786 4y ago
  Not sure there is anything to gain here. Moderation is inherently subjective, especially at the scale of Twitter. The same people would just continue arguing about what should and should not be moderated and how.
  - memish 4y ago
    Transparency would be helpful. At the very least it would cut off the speculation about what did or didn't behind the scenes. Right now it's a black box.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      transparency would mean that every action they take gets scrutinized to absurdity, there’s no way they’d open that door of their own volition
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    In all 14,000,605 futures people will argue about this. I think it would be better if it was an informed argument.
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  Both filtration(moderation) and sortation(the algorithm) should be handled exactly as Adblock handles it. People can create any list that they want, and people can choose to either subscribe to those lists or not, and can at anytime decide to see what it would look like if they were not.
mdb31 4y ago
Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions. Don't like that? Start your own platform, and see how that turns out. Related: yes, I do support interoperability requirements between platforms. No, that still doesn't mean you get to blast your opinion all over the internet without hitting a roadbump every now and then.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  When criticizing X, you cannot in good faith say — why don’t you build Y that’s like X? It just implicitly admits that criticizing X is off limits and you don’t like it.
  - mdb31 4y ago
    Except that's not what's happening here. When doing anything on the internet "how are you going to control spam and obvious trolls" is question #1. Twitter has an answer to that: we mechanically and/or personally identify spam/troll content, and ban their creators. Now, many people want them to stop doing that. Which they decline, since they KNOW what will be happening in that case. So, if you think you can do a better platform, while disregarding the (minimal) lessons learned from Twitter (or Reddit, or...), go ahead! You will fail, not because "criticism of the original platform is off-limits", but because it's a well-known anti-pattern.
    - blockwriter 4y ago
      Why not make the ban evident in a log of changes to a user's feed and allow that user to personally unban who they like? For a wide-swath of use cases from the recent past, the posts that incited the bans were not criminal in nature.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      The discussion is about whether people can see what the algorithms are doing. Read only access to the code so they cannot manipulate people into their belief system or arbitrary shadow-ban rules. You’re right about human judgement but that’s not the topic. The central point, I repeat emphatically, is about transparency, not governance. Twitter can continue exactly the same way but just be transparent. The intense pushback is because they’ve holed themselves into an untenable position? Not sure why people are so against transparency. Maybe they lied in congressional testimonies?
memish 4y ago
A marketplace of algorithms and "pick your own algorithm" would be interesting. Is there any reason not to do this? Not sure why this is getting downvoted. It's not crazy. Even Jack is pushing for it: "The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone" https://twitter.com/jack/status/1507146276416098307 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1507146276416098307
- capableweb 4y ago
  Hard to monetize when people can chose algorithms that doesn't prefer content that makes them stay at the platform longer, angry or happy. Public companies are all about making money.
  - mountainriver 4y ago
    Subscriptions?
  - hooande 4y ago
    who would choose to see unengaging content? "My algorithm is set to show bland agreement with last week's news"
- klyrs 4y ago
  Any reason to keep the general public from running arbitrary database queries? Yes, I think there is. For example, regular expressions are turing-complete so you can make a query arbitrarily slow without a single join. edit: complexity lol
  - capableweb 4y ago
    You could also just limit a query to max N seconds, and abort it if so. I don't think "marketplace of algorithms" necessarily mean people need to be able to make arbitrary database queries either, but seems besides the point. Having their own DSL for sorting timelines can also solve that problem nicely and within whatever performance requirements they would end up with.
  - 4y ago
dkobia 4y ago
The most contentious moderation happens via subjective human intervention rather than an algorithms. Fully machine driven moderation is a black hole into which copious amounts of time and money from the r&d labs of the biggest social media companies disappear into every year for a long time now.
- soheil 4y ago
  > The most contentious moderation happens via subjective human intervention rather than an algorithms. 1. Source? 2. Thought experiment: if said subjective human intervention was recorded and codified into an algorithm it wouldn't be as contentious?
  - crazy1van 4y ago
    Source for probably the most contentious piece of moderation Twitter has ever done being manual was their own statement: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,”
- ankit219 4y ago
  But the article is not talking about content moderation as such. It's about surfacing the right content for right people, and regain the trust that author believes twitter has lost, without really justifying how.
photochemsyn 4y ago
I think this is a great idea, and it shouldn't be limited to Twitter. Youtube recommendation algorithms should be handled similarly, indeed any public-facing system needs to be honest about the kind of spin they're putting on their recommendatiuon algorithms. Even better, allow the users to spin the dials when it comes down to their own particular searches/results. > “One of the things I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and make any changes to people’s tweets — you know, if they’re emphasized or de-emphasized — that action should be made apparent so anyone can see that action’s been taken. So there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation either algorithmically or manually.” Musk also added later, “The code should be on GitHub so people can look through it.”" (CNBC interview)
- yosito 4y ago
  > allow the users to spin the dials If I could pick something to regulate about recommendation algorithms, probably a big part of it would be mandating consumer controls over the algorithm. Complete transparency might be hard when sometimes even the programmers of these systems don't have the ability to see why they recommend what they do, but there should definitely also be mandatory oversight by consumer protection agencies that have full ability to audit the code and report on it.
dmitriid 4y ago
Twitter et al should/must let people opt-in to recommendation algorithms (opt-out being the default), and must have a "reset all recommendations" button present and visible at all times. I don't care about the actual algorithm.
baggy_trough 4y ago
The best feed is the chronological, non-algorithmic feed.
- jmull 4y ago
  An unmoderated chronological feed would simply be a running list of every tweet from every one. A screen full of this feed would just be tweets made at the moment the data for the screen refresh was fetched. Is that what you or anyone wants?
  - baggy_trough 4y ago
    Yes, of the people I choose to follow.
  - badwolf 4y ago
    Yes. This is exactly what I want. It's not a global feed of every twitter in existence, it's a feed of accounts that you proactively choose to follow.
    - jmull 4y ago
      How/where does discovery happen?
      - baggy_trough 4y ago
        As a pull, not a push. Meaning, in the very beginning, from off the chronological feed. Later, from following conversations of follows to new interesting accounts.
        jmull 4y ago
        I suppose you can ditch twitter and switch to reddit.
        baggy_trough 4y ago
jmugan 4y ago
I wish they'd just let me control what I see. Sure, throw an occasional ad in there to make money. It would be hard to blame them for the nastiness on Twitter if they didn't control it.
jimmaswell 4y ago
Sounds like a bad idea. Bad actors would immediately exploit it and figure out how to most effectively flood everyone with spam, same as if Google's exact algorithms were public. Not everything has to be open.
- LightHugger 4y ago
  On occasion, people make the same argument about all open source software, that making it public makes it insecure. Fortunately this has not turned out to be the case in reality. If there are flaws in the system they will probably be easier to find and fix with more eyes on it.
  - airstrike 4y ago
    The consumption of FOSS and the consumption of tweets are so different I don't really see the merit in comparing the two.
  - swores 4y ago
    In open source development you're trying to prevent exploits from being possible as much as you can, and for anything new you have time to get multiple people thinking about it before a release goes live. In content moderation vs spammers, you have spammers adapting to your tools in real time while posting content in the same way real users do, and the balance between "don't want to accidentally ban real users (who post stuff very similar to the bots)" vs "does it matter if someone gets past your defences a few times an hour" is massively different too.
  - agentdrtran 4y ago
    It's not about security bugs in this case, anti-spam needs obscurity as a layer of defense.
  - hooande 4y ago
    This is a terrible comparison. With OSS people are looking for security flaws. With a twitter/google algorithm people are trying to exploit the system when it works as intended. If there is a secret formula for a successful tweet, people will find it and repeat that behavior ad nauseum. The problem with google search isn't that people are exploiting 0-days that the developers aren't aware of. The problem is that the majority of the internet is becoming nearly identical pages that do the bare minimum to get ranked by search engines. Making the algorithm public will only exacerbate that
gfodor 4y ago
Recommender systems like Twitter are as much about data as they are about code. Without the dataset and the derived statistics and models that are used for ranking and recall, the code is not going to help much with transparency.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Exactly. “Here’s the code for our matrix multiplication, dot product, and sorting; you’re welcome to check it for bugs.”
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  This is a ridiculous claim. While you won’t be able to make use of the code, it would still provide insight of the inputs in relative terms, and evidence methods that do not apply.
  - Juliate 4y ago
    > and provide insight as to some things that are not being done. That's not an algorithm, that's product strategy & management.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    It would provide insight but if the goal is to increase transparency to the point of meaningfully improving trust in the centralized actor that is Twitter, I don’t see it moving that needle much. Given the right data you can kind of coax a lot of these algorithms into arbitrary outputs, so if you’re starting from a place of distrust then if you can’t replicate the outputs yourself you wont have evidence to alter priors significantly with just code imo.
    - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
      The point is to increase transparency, period. And you are the one arguing against that. Nobody is saying it’s enough, but it’s objectively better than nothing, and it would make it possible to ask more specific questions and make more specific arguments for the value of more transparency. Again, you are the one arguing against it but you have not provided a reason why.
soheil 4y ago
So by the same logic McDonald's should publish its secret sauce recipe. There is business value in keeping it hidden. It'd have a chance of happening if Twitter was taken private by someone with the intention of experimentation and improving the world in the long run.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  McDonald's is required in some places (Canada, for example) to publish the ingredients for its food. For example, Big Mac Sauce: Soybean oil, sweet relish (cucumber, glucose-fructose, sugar, vinegar, salt, xanthan gum, calcium chloride, natural flavour), water, vinegar, egg yolk, onion powder, spices, salt, propylene glycol alginate, colour, sugar, garlic powder, hydrolyzed (corn, soy, wheat) proteins. CONTAINS: Soy, Wheat, Egg, Mustard. -- https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/downloads/IngredientslistCA_EN.pdf https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/downloads/IngredientslistCA_EN.... And there are strict rules about how that ingredients list must be constructed: "Ingredients must be declared by their common name in descending order of their proportion by weight of a prepackaged product. The order must be the order or percentage of the ingredients before they are combined to form the prepackaged product. In other words, based on what was added to the mixing bowl" and on and on for many thousands of words, https://inspection.canada.ca/food-label-requirements/labelling/industry/list-of-ingredients-and-allergens/eng/1383612857522/1383612932341?chap=2 https://inspection.canada.ca/food-label-requirements/labelli... No, that's not the full recipe, but it is information a company might not want to disclose, but is required to disclose because it affects the health and safety of consumers.
CharlesW 4y ago
"Open up the algorithm" is such a charmingly naive take on community moderation at scale that I can almost forgive the author for literally parroting Musk as the source of a lightweight take synthesized mostly from other people's thoughts in order to attract attention to his "Every" newsletter platform.
- bko 4y ago
  I think that's a way to call for transparency. For instance, if they say they don't shadow ban people, then it should be evident in the code. And it would force them to have a clear process for things like search without any "nudging" or social manipulation.
- soheil 4y ago
  How do you know? Where did you come up with evidence to confirm that statement? There has never been a platform as large as Twitter that opened up its algorithm.
  - yuliyp 4y ago
    As an example, the bits of Google's original algorithms that they did talk about (pagerank using reputation of in-links to propagate to a page) publicly began getting gamed into irrelevance fairly early on (link-for-link schemes being the start of the SEO industry). After that it's been a continuing struggle of a whole industry looking for weaknesses and Google adapting. Another way of thinking about it, is that if someone could see what features were most important for the ranking on some site, then they could start to optimize for those, breaking the usefulness of that feature. One obvious example of this is "Please remember to like, comment, and subscribe" on YouTube.
  - extheat 4y ago
    For a long period of time, Reddit used to be open source. It can be done, plus additional changes to add transparency on top, like giving people the option to switch between different recommendation algorithms, making it clear why content was recommended, and so forth.
- 4y ago
11111 4y ago
jimkleiber 4y ago
Or just give us more options for viewing a feed than "recommended" or "latest." Heck, even create an alogrithm store where people could create and purchase different ways to view their feed. It doesn't seem that difficult to add these multiple sort and filter options, but maybe it's more complex than I imagine.
fareesh 4y ago
if(tweet.author.affiliation == "democrat"){ promoteTweet(tweet); } else { shadowBan(tweet.author); }
- cycrutchfield 4y ago
  Yes, this is what people legitimately think the recommendation system is like. It’s insane
- chx 4y ago
  Yishan Wong , the CEO of Reddit until 2012 have tweeted a long thread about how Musk doesn't understand the current state of moderation necessary because he was much more involved with an earlier Internet. But I am of opinion that Yishan is also behind as one half of the debaters simply left facts and reality behind. This post here is an example.
bko 4y ago
The twitter algo shouldn't be complicated. For the most part twitter shows me posts and likes from people I follow, occasionally sprinkling in a topic I follow, like viral tweets. I want to read stuff from people I follow in more or less chronological order. Sure if something has a 1k likes and was posted a few hours ago and I hadn't seen it, show me that. There are simple formulas for time based rank that are out there. But I regularly see twitter suppressing posts from people I follow. I won't see someone tweet for a few weeks and I check their account and I see they've been tweeting this whole time. It's wrong and annoying to me as a user.
admax88qqq 4y ago
The interesting question this poses and has come up on a few comment threada here is Is "security through on obscurity" necessary for automated content moderation? Would an open algorithm be trigially gamed by spammers as they can now test offline exactly how their posts will be ranked/promoted? My gut says yes but I'm not an expert in this area. Curious if anyone has a theory or idea on if an open moderation algorithm could work. SpamAssassin exists and is open to moderate success. But is that just because it's use is not widespread enough to bother to test your spam mails against it? If every email account in the world was covered by SpamAssassin, what would spam look like, and how much would make it through.
Juliate 4y ago
What would be much more interesting would be Twitter allowing users to define and publish their own algorithm, like lists with superpowers. Stumbled on this idea on https://twitter.com/nbashaw/status/1515054551371378688 https://twitter.com/nbashaw/status/1515054551371378688
eric4smith 4y ago
Amazingly Naive. Just the data and code needed to make the “algo” scale to what it is means there is no good way to “open it up”. But let’s say, and why not, that it actually was opened. I can see it now, everyone and their mother would be recommending changes to it. People would want it at the extremes, or tweaked to just not recommend their pet peeves. And if they did not get their way, they would go off in a huff and threaten to join another service. Years ago I ran a big enough service that had millions and millions of users every month. A member of the military came on and demanded we allow him to do something that was against TOS. He complained that this was what he fought in Iraq for. So he could write anything he wanted anywhere. America is certainly not free and it’s time we stop giving our content to services like Twitter and Facebook if we believe that.
- extheat 4y ago
  > I can see it now, everyone and their mother would be recommending changes to it. People would want it at the extremes, or tweaked to just not recommend their pet peeves. I think the solution to this is to let people switch between different recommendation algorithms, a stream of chronological tweets, most liked among recent posted, one powered by ML, etc. I don't see any reason the implementations behind this, or even Twitter more broadly, could not be open source. There are many other open source projects, like Signal that manage this just fine. And for a while, even Reddit used to be open source. It's definitely do-able.
  - curioushacking 4y ago
    Exactly. While ML interpretability may be tough, I don't really read it like that. More here are X number of algorithms and each one is aiming to do Y. Chronological, Engagement, Happiness, Current Trends, etc.
- bko 4y ago
  I think they're looking for a statement like: if (tweet.from in bad_users): score *= 0.8 Do they have the levers in place to manipulate results or is it a clear objective scoring system that shows what you see on your feed and search results? I believe they have something like this. To what extent its being manipulated is a separate question.
jdrc 4y ago
Do people really browse those recommendations? Twitter is for following a couple of people, switching to timeline mode, and done.
rasengan 4y ago
Even if you “open” the algorithm you won’t have proof that the system is in fact adhering to said algorithm or even including all data in its set.
310260 4y ago
The author's suggestion of a marketplace for algorithms sounds really cool. Whether it's easily technically feasible is another question entirely but the idea of that level of customization would be really cool. Some of the functionality is already there with Lists (as far as allowing regular users to create feeds and others being allowed to subscribe to them). I do worry about the political implications of it though. People choosing to subscribe to only their world view would create an impenetrable echo chamber. At least now, there is some crossover. If people chose algorithms that avoided the other side of a debate, it would make things worse. Furthermore, you could have outside influences tricking people into certain algorithms to secure a populace with their beliefs.
spacexsucks 4y ago
Amazingly naive to develop an Operating system in the open. Amazingly naive to try and build an electric car company. Amazingly naive to think the internet will be worth anything. Amazongly naive to think that everyone will need a computer in their pocket.
mritun 4y ago
Let’s start with HackerNews for a start. What would you say about opening up every poster who’s been blocked and exactly how and for reason (or keywords) they’ve been blocked? How about opening up what keywords trigger mail to go to spam vs inbox for email providers? It’s going to be very valuable for someone to know how spam filtering works if their delivery rate doubles!
dontreact 4y ago
Lots of good points here about how opening up the algorithm itself won't illuminate much and is technically extremely difficult without potentially devaluing the company since you would also have to open the data system behind the algorithm. However, open sourcing any and all manual interventions over the algorithm + the guidelines used for evaluation and/or labeling (if any is done), would help to build a little bit of trust. Not that much though, but it would be a start.
alm1 4y ago
I feel like authors are thinking about the "algorithm" almost as if it's just a bunch of if-else statements in a tree. Read only audit is an overly naive way to think about understanding complex algorithms. In an audit they would find an enable of large DNN transformer models with thousands of layers and thousands of features often with their own transformation trees. There are entire CS departments dedicated to researching tools to understand complex nonlinear models. You definitely can't do with a read only code audit. You can _barely_ do it with full access to the model, full access to the input data and being able to retrain and rerun the model on that data.
- CrimsonCape 4y ago
  You are suggesting the people who read HN and might click over to the "open Twitter" codebase won't understand it? Engineers don't exist in a vacuum, the same engineers who write the algos are here on HN. Show HN the Twitter source code and a lot of engineers will understand it. What is more likely is that the engineers are currently bound by NDAs and can't say what influences the algo.
alvaroir 4y ago
If the problem is that the "recommendations" are biased, wouldn't it be simpler to: 1) Remove the recommendation part. Go back to a simpler version of Twitter. 2) Still give the option for a recommendation system but, somehow, open the code, maybe some version of the data and publish documentation (like papers or something) detailing the training process of the current running version. than build a recommender system marketplace? Also, in what sense would this be different from allowing third party Twitter clients + opening a ritcher API? The ultimate idea of using ML is to "automatically" build the recommender system the user likes (measuring this with some particular metric like online time or retention) the most and also automatically adapt it as his/her preferences change. The problem to me is more the metrics chosen to be optimized. However, I believe that in the end, and in order to be profitable, user retention and time on the platform will still be pursued. It doesn't seem like an easy fix to me. Regarding the "free speech" part, I'm not an expert, but I'd say (and after having watched the TED interview) that countries' legislations will considerably constraint this. I love the idea of a true free platform tho
lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
Comments saying that this is naive seem to be completely missing the point in their desire to cynically defend a miserable state of affairs: clients, and not Twitter's servers, should ultimately determine what users see. Like the web browser or an email client. The fact that we calculate precisely what users see on their devices on servers is a result of the architectural constraints of the time, and more importantly, the ad model of monetizing social networks. If social networks were not monetized in this way, there would be far more power allocated to clients and APIs. This isn't to say user devices can do everything: they can't. But can easily be given significant power to filter, reorder, and request different content — and with more advanced engineering, allow users to parameterize feeds. The reason we can't have this is that allowing this degree of user choice undermines the ads model.
- shalmanese 4y ago
  > clients, and not Twitter's servers, should ultimately determine what users see. Like the web browser or an email client. That would involve giving clients access to information that clients probably shouldn't have. eg: If a part of the weighting for recommendation is that people you follow who regularly DM other people you follow should be weighted higher, doing it client side would allow you to see other people's private DM information.
ravish0007 4y ago
Elon will definitely access private conversations if he takes Twitter private.
pkphilip 4y ago
I my experience as someone who resides in India, I have seen Twitter repeatedly silencing voices of the opposition and amplifying the voices of those connected and aligned with the majoritarian, right-wing elements - and I don't think it is because of any algorithm. There are clearly people involved deciding case-by-case to shutout voices of the opposition. We have seen this with Facebook as well with Facebook charging 3 times higher for ads from the opposition parties in a bid to influence the elections: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/16/facebook-charged-bjp-lower-rates-for-india-polls-ads-than-others https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/16/facebook-charged...

71 points by dshipper 4y ago

andrew_ 4y ago

Make moderation guidelines and moderation audit trails public and open.

mdb31 4y ago
Yes, like the lobste.rs moderation log. It's cute because, like, nobody cares.
rco8786 4y ago
Not sure there is anything to gain here. Moderation is inherently subjective, especially at the scale of Twitter. The same people would just continue arguing about what should and should not be moderated and how.
- memish 4y ago
  Transparency would be helpful. At the very least it would cut off the speculation about what did or didn't behind the scenes. Right now it's a black box.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    transparency would mean that every action they take gets scrutinized to absurdity, there’s no way they’d open that door of their own volition
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  In all 14,000,605 futures people will argue about this. I think it would be better if it was an informed argument.
ItsMonkk 4y ago
Both filtration(moderation) and sortation(the algorithm) should be handled exactly as Adblock handles it. People can create any list that they want, and people can choose to either subscribe to those lists or not, and can at anytime decide to see what it would look like if they were not.

mdb31 4y ago

Oh my. Twitter, or any other platform, is not your megaphone that will amplify your opinion without restrictions. Don't like that? Start your own platform, and see how that turns out. Related: yes, I do support interoperability requirements between platforms. No, that still doesn't mean you get to blast your opinion all over the internet without hitting a roadbump every now and then.

systemvoltage 4y ago
When criticizing X, you cannot in good faith say — why don’t you build Y that’s like X? It just implicitly admits that criticizing X is off limits and you don’t like it.
- mdb31 4y ago
  Except that's not what's happening here. When doing anything on the internet "how are you going to control spam and obvious trolls" is question #1. Twitter has an answer to that: we mechanically and/or personally identify spam/troll content, and ban their creators. Now, many people want them to stop doing that. Which they decline, since they KNOW what will be happening in that case. So, if you think you can do a better platform, while disregarding the (minimal) lessons learned from Twitter (or Reddit, or...), go ahead! You will fail, not because "criticism of the original platform is off-limits", but because it's a well-known anti-pattern.
  - blockwriter 4y ago
    Why not make the ban evident in a log of changes to a user's feed and allow that user to personally unban who they like? For a wide-swath of use cases from the recent past, the posts that incited the bans were not criminal in nature.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    The discussion is about whether people can see what the algorithms are doing. Read only access to the code so they cannot manipulate people into their belief system or arbitrary shadow-ban rules. You’re right about human judgement but that’s not the topic. The central point, I repeat emphatically, is about transparency, not governance. Twitter can continue exactly the same way but just be transparent. The intense pushback is because they’ve holed themselves into an untenable position? Not sure why people are so against transparency. Maybe they lied in congressional testimonies?

memish 4y ago

A marketplace of algorithms and "pick your own algorithm" would be interesting. Is there any reason not to do this? Not sure why this is getting downvoted. It's not crazy. Even Jack is pushing for it: "The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone" https://twitter.com/jack/status/1507146276416098307 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1507146276416098307

capableweb 4y ago
Hard to monetize when people can chose algorithms that doesn't prefer content that makes them stay at the platform longer, angry or happy. Public companies are all about making money.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Subscriptions?
- hooande 4y ago
  who would choose to see unengaging content? "My algorithm is set to show bland agreement with last week's news"
klyrs 4y ago
Any reason to keep the general public from running arbitrary database queries? Yes, I think there is. For example, regular expressions are turing-complete so you can make a query arbitrarily slow without a single join. edit: complexity lol
- capableweb 4y ago
  You could also just limit a query to max N seconds, and abort it if so. I don't think "marketplace of algorithms" necessarily mean people need to be able to make arbitrary database queries either, but seems besides the point. Having their own DSL for sorting timelines can also solve that problem nicely and within whatever performance requirements they would end up with.
- 4y ago

dkobia 4y ago

The most contentious moderation happens via subjective human intervention rather than an algorithms. Fully machine driven moderation is a black hole into which copious amounts of time and money from the r&d labs of the biggest social media companies disappear into every year for a long time now.

soheil 4y ago
> The most contentious moderation happens via subjective human intervention rather than an algorithms. 1. Source? 2. Thought experiment: if said subjective human intervention was recorded and codified into an algorithm it wouldn't be as contentious?
- crazy1van 4y ago
  Source for probably the most contentious piece of moderation Twitter has ever done being manual was their own statement: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,”
ankit219 4y ago
But the article is not talking about content moderation as such. It's about surfacing the right content for right people, and regain the trust that author believes twitter has lost, without really justifying how.

photochemsyn 4y ago

I think this is a great idea, and it shouldn't be limited to Twitter. Youtube recommendation algorithms should be handled similarly, indeed any public-facing system needs to be honest about the kind of spin they're putting on their recommendatiuon algorithms. Even better, allow the users to spin the dials when it comes down to their own particular searches/results. > “One of the things I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and make any changes to people’s tweets — you know, if they’re emphasized or de-emphasized — that action should be made apparent so anyone can see that action’s been taken. So there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation either algorithmically or manually.” Musk also added later, “The code should be on GitHub so people can look through it.”" (CNBC interview)

yosito 4y ago
> allow the users to spin the dials If I could pick something to regulate about recommendation algorithms, probably a big part of it would be mandating consumer controls over the algorithm. Complete transparency might be hard when sometimes even the programmers of these systems don't have the ability to see why they recommend what they do, but there should definitely also be mandatory oversight by consumer protection agencies that have full ability to audit the code and report on it.

dmitriid 4y ago

Twitter et al should/must let people opt-in to recommendation algorithms (opt-out being the default), and must have a "reset all recommendations" button present and visible at all times. I don't care about the actual algorithm.

baggy_trough 4y ago

The best feed is the chronological, non-algorithmic feed.

jmull 4y ago
An unmoderated chronological feed would simply be a running list of every tweet from every one. A screen full of this feed would just be tweets made at the moment the data for the screen refresh was fetched. Is that what you or anyone wants?
- baggy_trough 4y ago
  Yes, of the people I choose to follow.
- badwolf 4y ago
  Yes. This is exactly what I want. It's not a global feed of every twitter in existence, it's a feed of accounts that you proactively choose to follow.
  - jmull 4y ago
    How/where does discovery happen?
    - baggy_trough 4y ago
      As a pull, not a push. Meaning, in the very beginning, from off the chronological feed. Later, from following conversations of follows to new interesting accounts.
      - jmull 4y ago
        I suppose you can ditch twitter and switch to reddit.
        baggy_trough 4y ago

jmugan 4y ago

I wish they'd just let me control what I see. Sure, throw an occasional ad in there to make money. It would be hard to blame them for the nastiness on Twitter if they didn't control it.

jimmaswell 4y ago

Sounds like a bad idea. Bad actors would immediately exploit it and figure out how to most effectively flood everyone with spam, same as if Google's exact algorithms were public. Not everything has to be open.

LightHugger 4y ago
On occasion, people make the same argument about all open source software, that making it public makes it insecure. Fortunately this has not turned out to be the case in reality. If there are flaws in the system they will probably be easier to find and fix with more eyes on it.
- airstrike 4y ago
  The consumption of FOSS and the consumption of tweets are so different I don't really see the merit in comparing the two.
- swores 4y ago
  In open source development you're trying to prevent exploits from being possible as much as you can, and for anything new you have time to get multiple people thinking about it before a release goes live. In content moderation vs spammers, you have spammers adapting to your tools in real time while posting content in the same way real users do, and the balance between "don't want to accidentally ban real users (who post stuff very similar to the bots)" vs "does it matter if someone gets past your defences a few times an hour" is massively different too.
- agentdrtran 4y ago
  It's not about security bugs in this case, anti-spam needs obscurity as a layer of defense.
- hooande 4y ago
  This is a terrible comparison. With OSS people are looking for security flaws. With a twitter/google algorithm people are trying to exploit the system when it works as intended. If there is a secret formula for a successful tweet, people will find it and repeat that behavior ad nauseum. The problem with google search isn't that people are exploiting 0-days that the developers aren't aware of. The problem is that the majority of the internet is becoming nearly identical pages that do the bare minimum to get ranked by search engines. Making the algorithm public will only exacerbate that

gfodor 4y ago

Recommender systems like Twitter are as much about data as they are about code. Without the dataset and the derived statistics and models that are used for ranking and recall, the code is not going to help much with transparency.

sokoloff 4y ago
Exactly. “Here’s the code for our matrix multiplication, dot product, and sorting; you’re welcome to check it for bugs.”
nopenopenopeno 4y ago
This is a ridiculous claim. While you won’t be able to make use of the code, it would still provide insight of the inputs in relative terms, and evidence methods that do not apply.
- Juliate 4y ago
  > and provide insight as to some things that are not being done. That's not an algorithm, that's product strategy & management.
- gfodor 4y ago
  It would provide insight but if the goal is to increase transparency to the point of meaningfully improving trust in the centralized actor that is Twitter, I don’t see it moving that needle much. Given the right data you can kind of coax a lot of these algorithms into arbitrary outputs, so if you’re starting from a place of distrust then if you can’t replicate the outputs yourself you wont have evidence to alter priors significantly with just code imo.
  - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
    The point is to increase transparency, period. And you are the one arguing against that. Nobody is saying it’s enough, but it’s objectively better than nothing, and it would make it possible to ask more specific questions and make more specific arguments for the value of more transparency. Again, you are the one arguing against it but you have not provided a reason why.

soheil 4y ago

So by the same logic McDonald's should publish its secret sauce recipe. There is business value in keeping it hidden. It'd have a chance of happening if Twitter was taken private by someone with the intention of experimentation and improving the world in the long run.

rufus_foreman 4y ago
McDonald's is required in some places (Canada, for example) to publish the ingredients for its food. For example, Big Mac Sauce: Soybean oil, sweet relish (cucumber, glucose-fructose, sugar, vinegar, salt, xanthan gum, calcium chloride, natural flavour), water, vinegar, egg yolk, onion powder, spices, salt, propylene glycol alginate, colour, sugar, garlic powder, hydrolyzed (corn, soy, wheat) proteins. CONTAINS: Soy, Wheat, Egg, Mustard. -- https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/downloads/IngredientslistCA_EN.pdf https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/downloads/IngredientslistCA_EN.... And there are strict rules about how that ingredients list must be constructed: "Ingredients must be declared by their common name in descending order of their proportion by weight of a prepackaged product. The order must be the order or percentage of the ingredients before they are combined to form the prepackaged product. In other words, based on what was added to the mixing bowl" and on and on for many thousands of words, https://inspection.canada.ca/food-label-requirements/labelling/industry/list-of-ingredients-and-allergens/eng/1383612857522/1383612932341?chap=2 https://inspection.canada.ca/food-label-requirements/labelli... No, that's not the full recipe, but it is information a company might not want to disclose, but is required to disclose because it affects the health and safety of consumers.

CharlesW 4y ago

"Open up the algorithm" is such a charmingly naive take on community moderation at scale that I can almost forgive the author for literally parroting Musk as the source of a lightweight take synthesized mostly from other people's thoughts in order to attract attention to his "Every" newsletter platform.

bko 4y ago
I think that's a way to call for transparency. For instance, if they say they don't shadow ban people, then it should be evident in the code. And it would force them to have a clear process for things like search without any "nudging" or social manipulation.
soheil 4y ago
How do you know? Where did you come up with evidence to confirm that statement? There has never been a platform as large as Twitter that opened up its algorithm.
- yuliyp 4y ago
  As an example, the bits of Google's original algorithms that they did talk about (pagerank using reputation of in-links to propagate to a page) publicly began getting gamed into irrelevance fairly early on (link-for-link schemes being the start of the SEO industry). After that it's been a continuing struggle of a whole industry looking for weaknesses and Google adapting. Another way of thinking about it, is that if someone could see what features were most important for the ranking on some site, then they could start to optimize for those, breaking the usefulness of that feature. One obvious example of this is "Please remember to like, comment, and subscribe" on YouTube.
- extheat 4y ago
  For a long period of time, Reddit used to be open source. It can be done, plus additional changes to add transparency on top, like giving people the option to switch between different recommendation algorithms, making it clear why content was recommended, and so forth.
4y ago

11111 4y ago

jimkleiber 4y ago

Or just give us more options for viewing a feed than "recommended" or "latest." Heck, even create an alogrithm store where people could create and purchase different ways to view their feed. It doesn't seem that difficult to add these multiple sort and filter options, but maybe it's more complex than I imagine.

fareesh 4y ago

if(tweet.author.affiliation == "democrat"){ promoteTweet(tweet); } else { shadowBan(tweet.author); }

cycrutchfield 4y ago
Yes, this is what people legitimately think the recommendation system is like. It’s insane
chx 4y ago
Yishan Wong , the CEO of Reddit until 2012 have tweeted a long thread about how Musk doesn't understand the current state of moderation necessary because he was much more involved with an earlier Internet. But I am of opinion that Yishan is also behind as one half of the debaters simply left facts and reality behind. This post here is an example.

bko 4y ago

The twitter algo shouldn't be complicated. For the most part twitter shows me posts and likes from people I follow, occasionally sprinkling in a topic I follow, like viral tweets. I want to read stuff from people I follow in more or less chronological order. Sure if something has a 1k likes and was posted a few hours ago and I hadn't seen it, show me that. There are simple formulas for time based rank that are out there. But I regularly see twitter suppressing posts from people I follow. I won't see someone tweet for a few weeks and I check their account and I see they've been tweeting this whole time. It's wrong and annoying to me as a user.

admax88qqq 4y ago

The interesting question this poses and has come up on a few comment threada here is Is "security through on obscurity" necessary for automated content moderation? Would an open algorithm be trigially gamed by spammers as they can now test offline exactly how their posts will be ranked/promoted? My gut says yes but I'm not an expert in this area. Curious if anyone has a theory or idea on if an open moderation algorithm could work. SpamAssassin exists and is open to moderate success. But is that just because it's use is not widespread enough to bother to test your spam mails against it? If every email account in the world was covered by SpamAssassin, what would spam look like, and how much would make it through.

Juliate 4y ago

What would be much more interesting would be Twitter allowing users to define and publish their own algorithm, like lists with superpowers. Stumbled on this idea on https://twitter.com/nbashaw/status/1515054551371378688 https://twitter.com/nbashaw/status/1515054551371378688

eric4smith 4y ago

Amazingly Naive. Just the data and code needed to make the “algo” scale to what it is means there is no good way to “open it up”. But let’s say, and why not, that it actually was opened. I can see it now, everyone and their mother would be recommending changes to it. People would want it at the extremes, or tweaked to just not recommend their pet peeves. And if they did not get their way, they would go off in a huff and threaten to join another service. Years ago I ran a big enough service that had millions and millions of users every month. A member of the military came on and demanded we allow him to do something that was against TOS. He complained that this was what he fought in Iraq for. So he could write anything he wanted anywhere. America is certainly not free and it’s time we stop giving our content to services like Twitter and Facebook if we believe that.

extheat 4y ago
> I can see it now, everyone and their mother would be recommending changes to it. People would want it at the extremes, or tweaked to just not recommend their pet peeves. I think the solution to this is to let people switch between different recommendation algorithms, a stream of chronological tweets, most liked among recent posted, one powered by ML, etc. I don't see any reason the implementations behind this, or even Twitter more broadly, could not be open source. There are many other open source projects, like Signal that manage this just fine. And for a while, even Reddit used to be open source. It's definitely do-able.
- curioushacking 4y ago
  Exactly. While ML interpretability may be tough, I don't really read it like that. More here are X number of algorithms and each one is aiming to do Y. Chronological, Engagement, Happiness, Current Trends, etc.
bko 4y ago
I think they're looking for a statement like: if (tweet.from in bad_users): score *= 0.8 Do they have the levers in place to manipulate results or is it a clear objective scoring system that shows what you see on your feed and search results? I believe they have something like this. To what extent its being manipulated is a separate question.

jdrc 4y ago

Do people really browse those recommendations? Twitter is for following a couple of people, switching to timeline mode, and done.

rasengan 4y ago

Even if you “open” the algorithm you won’t have proof that the system is in fact adhering to said algorithm or even including all data in its set.

310260 4y ago

The author's suggestion of a marketplace for algorithms sounds really cool. Whether it's easily technically feasible is another question entirely but the idea of that level of customization would be really cool. Some of the functionality is already there with Lists (as far as allowing regular users to create feeds and others being allowed to subscribe to them). I do worry about the political implications of it though. People choosing to subscribe to only their world view would create an impenetrable echo chamber. At least now, there is some crossover. If people chose algorithms that avoided the other side of a debate, it would make things worse. Furthermore, you could have outside influences tricking people into certain algorithms to secure a populace with their beliefs.

spacexsucks 4y ago

Amazingly naive to develop an Operating system in the open. Amazingly naive to try and build an electric car company. Amazingly naive to think the internet will be worth anything. Amazongly naive to think that everyone will need a computer in their pocket.

mritun 4y ago

Let’s start with HackerNews for a start. What would you say about opening up every poster who’s been blocked and exactly how and for reason (or keywords) they’ve been blocked? How about opening up what keywords trigger mail to go to spam vs inbox for email providers? It’s going to be very valuable for someone to know how spam filtering works if their delivery rate doubles!

dontreact 4y ago

Lots of good points here about how opening up the algorithm itself won't illuminate much and is technically extremely difficult without potentially devaluing the company since you would also have to open the data system behind the algorithm. However, open sourcing any and all manual interventions over the algorithm + the guidelines used for evaluation and/or labeling (if any is done), would help to build a little bit of trust. Not that much though, but it would be a start.

alm1 4y ago

I feel like authors are thinking about the "algorithm" almost as if it's just a bunch of if-else statements in a tree. Read only audit is an overly naive way to think about understanding complex algorithms. In an audit they would find an enable of large DNN transformer models with thousands of layers and thousands of features often with their own transformation trees. There are entire CS departments dedicated to researching tools to understand complex nonlinear models. You definitely can't do with a read only code audit. You can _barely_ do it with full access to the model, full access to the input data and being able to retrain and rerun the model on that data.

CrimsonCape 4y ago
You are suggesting the people who read HN and might click over to the "open Twitter" codebase won't understand it? Engineers don't exist in a vacuum, the same engineers who write the algos are here on HN. Show HN the Twitter source code and a lot of engineers will understand it. What is more likely is that the engineers are currently bound by NDAs and can't say what influences the algo.

alvaroir 4y ago

If the problem is that the "recommendations" are biased, wouldn't it be simpler to: 1) Remove the recommendation part. Go back to a simpler version of Twitter. 2) Still give the option for a recommendation system but, somehow, open the code, maybe some version of the data and publish documentation (like papers or something) detailing the training process of the current running version. than build a recommender system marketplace? Also, in what sense would this be different from allowing third party Twitter clients + opening a ritcher API? The ultimate idea of using ML is to "automatically" build the recommender system the user likes (measuring this with some particular metric like online time or retention) the most and also automatically adapt it as his/her preferences change. The problem to me is more the metrics chosen to be optimized. However, I believe that in the end, and in order to be profitable, user retention and time on the platform will still be pursued. It doesn't seem like an easy fix to me. Regarding the "free speech" part, I'm not an expert, but I'd say (and after having watched the TED interview) that countries' legislations will considerably constraint this. I love the idea of a true free platform tho

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

Comments saying that this is naive seem to be completely missing the point in their desire to cynically defend a miserable state of affairs: clients, and not Twitter's servers, should ultimately determine what users see. Like the web browser or an email client. The fact that we calculate precisely what users see on their devices on servers is a result of the architectural constraints of the time, and more importantly, the ad model of monetizing social networks. If social networks were not monetized in this way, there would be far more power allocated to clients and APIs. This isn't to say user devices can do everything: they can't. But can easily be given significant power to filter, reorder, and request different content — and with more advanced engineering, allow users to parameterize feeds. The reason we can't have this is that allowing this degree of user choice undermines the ads model.

shalmanese 4y ago
> clients, and not Twitter's servers, should ultimately determine what users see. Like the web browser or an email client. That would involve giving clients access to information that clients probably shouldn't have. eg: If a part of the weighting for recommendation is that people you follow who regularly DM other people you follow should be weighted higher, doing it client side would allow you to see other people's private DM information.

ravish0007 4y ago

Elon will definitely access private conversations if he takes Twitter private.

pkphilip 4y ago

I my experience as someone who resides in India, I have seen Twitter repeatedly silencing voices of the opposition and amplifying the voices of those connected and aligned with the majoritarian, right-wing elements - and I don't think it is because of any algorithm. There are clearly people involved deciding case-by-case to shutout voices of the opposition. We have seen this with Facebook as well with Facebook charging 3 times higher for ads from the opposition parties in a bid to influence the elections: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/16/facebook-charged-bjp-lower-rates-for-india-polls-ads-than-others https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/16/facebook-charged...