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As someone who’s also worked in this area, I disagree with this take. There is typically clear objective function of a recommendation system. What Twitter is
by suadeo 4y ago
As someone who’s also worked in this area, I disagree with this take.
There is typically clear objective function of a recommendation system.
What Twitter is optimizing for is what’s of interest here. And some of the hidden business rules. It’s likely these are specified in the code in an obvious way.
How exactly they achieve that is the part that is complex and relatively indecipherable.
It’s possible that it’s designed in such a way the optimization objectives are also unclear, but that would indicate a bad design and be to the detriment of the company and users.
- arriu 4y agoYeah seriously. If they are not able to put into words or diagrams what the algorithm is doing then the company itself has no idea how it works. And that to me would suggest it’s far from optimal. Many complicated research papers have had no issues describing their models at a high level. This should be no different.
- axg11 4y agoTwitter PMs would argue they've already communicated the objective function: relevance and engagement. My point is that the devil is in the details and implementation. These details are likely something that no one person understands and no one person is able to fix. The concept of being able to extract "the algorithm", factor it out from the codebase and share it with the public doesn't make sense to me. It won't be possible to fully understand how Twitter serves recommendations and ranks posts without understanding how all the different services at Twitter interact. Are they planning on open sourcing all of Twitter? Highly doubtful.