7 ms·

It's disappointing the comments are so obsessed with the political angle to this that there's a total lack of appreciation (or discussion) of opening up the mos

It's disappointing the comments are so obsessed with the political angle to this that there's a total lack of appreciation (or discussion) of opening up the most influential social media platform in the world.

smt88 4y ago
This is transparency theatre, not actual transparency. There's no way to actually use this limited release to understand how or why any tweet is boosted, so we're in exactly the same boat we were in yesterday.
- corbulo 4y ago
  This sentiment has high correlation to driving conclusions from a very time limited information set. This isn't the only part that is going to be posted to github. What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives? I don't understand the purpose of that approach. Help me.
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    > can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives This seems to be unsubstantiated. Are you really claiming that selective disclosure is always superior to complete lack of transparency?
    - corbulo 4y ago
      The degree to which it is selective has yet to be determined. Are you claiming total ignorance is superior to partial revelation? I think we would all do ourselves better to go live on a desert island and abandon everything about modern life. A shovel might be useful to bury our heads while we're there.
      - joshuamorton 4y ago
        > Are you claiming total ignorance is superior to partial revelation? I am claiming that this is at least sometimes true, yes. Not always, but sometimes. You're the one claiming that partial revelation is always, without exception, superior to total ignorance. That seems unlikely. Propoganda is often partial revelation, are you saying it is always better to receive only propoganda than to receive no information at all?
        corbulo 4y ago
        I think there is objective value to understanding propaganda's origins and goals. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not understand propaganda are highly likely to be controlled by it. Propaganda can be a pretty vague term by the way. Can you describe how the public coming to a better understanding of the inner workings of the worlds most influential social media site is merely propaganda?
        joshuamorton 4y ago
        > I think there is objective value to understanding propaganda's origins and goals Of course, but this requires the propaganda be contextualized, which wasn't a part of the situation I was suggesting. > Can you describe how the public coming to a better understanding of the inner workings of the worlds most influential social media site is merely propaganda? You're begging the question. Does Twitters disclosure of parts of the algorithm used (but certainly not all!) actually lead to a better understanding of the inner workings of Twitter? Or is such a release actually serving some purpose beyond transparency? If we had that, I'd agree it would be good. But I'm not convinced we do. Elon's done the exact same thing before at Twitter with his selective disclosure of material to friendly journalists in the "Twitter files". That, in my opinion, led to an overall worse understanding of Twitter's actions, not better.
        corbulo 4y ago
        Then the analogy fails to hold up to reality. There's plenty of information to contextualize. Assuming by default everyone but you is a naïve doe lost in a forest and therefore lacks the intellect to contextualize anything for themselves is undemocratic. >But I'm not convinced we do. That would likely be because, as mentioned previously there is still more to come out; it's not possible to be reasonably convinced yet. Going back to the original question: >>What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives?
    - lannisterstark 4y ago
      Yes. 1>0
      - joshuamorton 4y ago
        What is "one" and what is "zero"? Are you saying that information can't ever be misleading? Like if I tell you that your boyfriend has been having secret meetings with some woman you don't know, with full knowledge that the secret meetings are because she's a photographer and he's planning to propose, have I improved things by disclosing the information to you in that manner? Were my actions a "net positive"?
    - cwkoss 4y ago
      Yep "Limited Hangouts" are a common disinfo technique
- Joeri 4y ago
  I did find the article more enlightening than the source code. I always suspected the quality of a tweet did not factor in to its promotion, only its engagement, and now they have confirmed this to be the case. Now I understand better why twitter seems to be filled with people angrily retweeting what I consider to be low quality clickbait tweets. As long as they don’t try to tackle tweet quality at all separately from engagement twitter will remain unappealing to me.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    What does "quality of a tweet" mean, how might you measure it? We pretty much knew this is how all social media works, becuase a) engagement is what they want, why wouldn't they be optimizing for it, and b) how else might you measure 'quality'? Back when this started, I have no trouble believing some well-intentioned engineers thought that engagement was a good proxy for quality. A bunch of users give it the "like", isn't that a collective assessment of quality? Who is to say what quality is, overruling the users in aggregate? I agree it has the negative effects you mention; and I've read lots of people writing about this, it's of course not a new observation. But I agree it's good to have an explanation of what's going on, even when parts of are what we basically knew was happening on all social media networks. confirmed is better than "basically knew", for understanding how these things that effect our experiences (and our society) work.
  - dbbk 4y ago
    "Quality of a tweet" is impossible for a computer to understand. That's like asking to quantify the value of a work of art just from the image.
- icelancer 4y ago
  This is definitely incorrect. Weights for images, links, misspellings, etc are all laid out in the code and have been detailed by multiple people on Twitter already.
- cosmojg 4y ago
  But why not shower Twitter with praise for doing more than any other social media company in a similar market position? In the best case scenario, we might inspire a transparency arms race. In the worst case, we merely signal that transparency of any kind is rewarded, and that's a good thing if we want more transparency.
  - smt88 4y ago
    > But why not shower Twitter with praise for doing more than any other social media company in a similar market position? Because selective disclosure is often propaganda. If a third party had chosen what the release or verified this is what's actually running in production, I would praise them. Considering Elon's incessant lying, self-promotion, and manipulation, it's impossible to be complimentary of this at all. Everything he does is in bad faith.
nonethewiser 4y ago
The funny thing is that angle owes itself to Elon coming through on his promise to open source this. This is a great thing.
- deckard1 4y ago
  It would also be a total Elon move to confuse the open sourcing of Twitter's internal code with actual transparency. You would need, at a minimum, a neutral third-party audit of Twitter's servers to conclude that the source code we see on GitHub is, in fact, the source code running Twitter. How often will they keep their GitHub repo in sync with their internal code, I wonder. Presumably Twitter uses a version control system. But they scrubbed the history so that's also a point against their "transparency" claims. Without knowing the when and the why of changes you can't understand what you are looking at. People are pointing to that "author_is_elon" without knowing whether that was done before Elon bought Twitter or after. But even then, git history can be faked. > This is a great thing. I disagree. It's the opposite. It provides the illusion of openness without the quality of openness, thus killing the debate once and for all.
HeckFeck 4y ago
I have to admit I am geeking out whilst skimming source code I barely understand.
fanagra32 4y ago
"Opening up"? You must be kidding. Nothing is open there. It's just open-washing. A few nice diagrams, but how the services _actually_ work is still hidden.
- hayd 4y ago
  > Most of the recommendation algorithm will be made open source today. The rest will follow. So let's wait and see...
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  If you ignore the hundreds of thousands of LoC... then yeah I guess it's just diagrams? Are you sure you actually looked at the main code repo?
SilverBirch 4y ago
One of the things that makes my spidey sense tingle is when people say oddly sycophantic things about Elon Musk. Twitter is big, it's important. It's not "the most influential social media platform in the world".
- corbulo 4y ago
  I only see one social media site posts being constantly reposted on global news organizations. Are all of the corporations, world governments, and leaders with tens of millions of followers actually wasting their time by dedicating their social media teams time to twitter instead of focusing on some other social media site thats more influential? Which one is it then? It's quite odd to attribute objective analysis to sycophancy. I intentionally didn't mention him but here you are bringing him up and fulfilling my point. Who is the sycophant?
yurodivuie 4y ago
I'm sure we can all think of examples where a power structure (a company, a country, a prison, a family) invited people in for a supervised tour that was less than honest in its presentation. But really, if people respond to Twitter's actions politically, that response exists within a context that was certainly influenced by Twitter's prior actions.
random_cynic 4y ago
[flagged]
- drstewart 4y ago
  It's actually shocking to see some of the discussion and understanding of the code here. I'd say the "part-time programmers" qualifier is even generous. Sad to see.
- xeromal 4y ago
  It seems to be that way but its also in the rules not to complain about that. I do wonder if it's getting worse.
- chocolatkey 4y ago
  I would agree the quality of posts has gone downhill, and is way too political for my liking, but there's not much other place to go that isn't elitist.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    Discord. As much as I hate Discord the platform (and I really do hate it, far more than, say, Twitter), Discord does have a lot of good communities.
    - chocolatkey 4y ago
      I don't think Discord is a substitute for HN. If I know an exact community with a shared interest I want to join then yes, I can find their Discord an join it. But how am I supposed to come across that topic and become interested in the first place? HN (in its ideal form) is a place where I am introduced to a variety of random but potentially interesting technology-related topics, from programming languages to passion projects to lessons in business etc, some of which I will pursue and seek out a community for, and others which I only care about minimally, not enough to want to join a dedicated community for. If you want to compare HN to Discord, I would say that HN is like joining 500 Discord servers that together comprise the type of content discussed and posted about on HN, and every day checking each one's announcements channel, and skimming through general chats. But you still have the issue of being introduced to new topics, for example if you're interested in the AI trends then your selection of Discord servers that comprise what's posted on HN would be dramatically changing in the past few months.
KyleBerezin 4y ago
I would love for the system to be somehow auditable, to verify this algorithm is THE algorithm.
lawgimenez 4y ago
Just read the article and not the comments. Comments here used to be something you learn new stuffs, apparently that is not the case anymore.
mlindner 4y ago
I had to go to the second page to find this. I completely agree. I clicked this thread looking forward to seeing some intelligent discussion of the merits of the source and issues/interesting tidbits, instead I see a bunch of Elon Musk ranting and complaining and pointing out drive-by poor pull requests issues. I really wish the adults would start to talk.
- concordDance 4y ago
  I would definitely love a techy community that focused on technology like the hackernews of 10 years ago. If you know of one then please link me to it.
  - losvedir 4y ago
    lobste.rs is pretty good, in terms of higher tech discussion signal to noise, I think, though it still does have a bit of a political bent. Email me if you want an invite.
DuckFeathers 4y ago
Attacks on Elon has been growing since he started calling out corruption.

smt88 4y ago

This is transparency theatre, not actual transparency. There's no way to actually use this limited release to understand how or why any tweet is boosted, so we're in exactly the same boat we were in yesterday.

corbulo 4y ago
This sentiment has high correlation to driving conclusions from a very time limited information set. This isn't the only part that is going to be posted to github. What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives? I don't understand the purpose of that approach. Help me.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  > can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives This seems to be unsubstantiated. Are you really claiming that selective disclosure is always superior to complete lack of transparency?
  - corbulo 4y ago
    The degree to which it is selective has yet to be determined. Are you claiming total ignorance is superior to partial revelation? I think we would all do ourselves better to go live on a desert island and abandon everything about modern life. A shovel might be useful to bury our heads while we're there.
    - joshuamorton 4y ago
      > Are you claiming total ignorance is superior to partial revelation? I am claiming that this is at least sometimes true, yes. Not always, but sometimes. You're the one claiming that partial revelation is always, without exception, superior to total ignorance. That seems unlikely. Propoganda is often partial revelation, are you saying it is always better to receive only propoganda than to receive no information at all?
      - corbulo 4y ago
        I think there is objective value to understanding propaganda's origins and goals. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not understand propaganda are highly likely to be controlled by it. Propaganda can be a pretty vague term by the way. Can you describe how the public coming to a better understanding of the inner workings of the worlds most influential social media site is merely propaganda?
        joshuamorton 4y ago
        > I think there is objective value to understanding propaganda's origins and goals Of course, but this requires the propaganda be contextualized, which wasn't a part of the situation I was suggesting. > Can you describe how the public coming to a better understanding of the inner workings of the worlds most influential social media site is merely propaganda? You're begging the question. Does Twitters disclosure of parts of the algorithm used (but certainly not all!) actually lead to a better understanding of the inner workings of Twitter? Or is such a release actually serving some purpose beyond transparency? If we had that, I'd agree it would be good. But I'm not convinced we do. Elon's done the exact same thing before at Twitter with his selective disclosure of material to friendly journalists in the "Twitter files". That, in my opinion, led to an overall worse understanding of Twitter's actions, not better.
        corbulo 4y ago
        Then the analogy fails to hold up to reality. There's plenty of information to contextualize. Assuming by default everyone but you is a naïve doe lost in a forest and therefore lacks the intellect to contextualize anything for themselves is undemocratic. >But I'm not convinced we do. That would likely be because, as mentioned previously there is still more to come out; it's not possible to be reasonably convinced yet. Going back to the original question: >>What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives?
  - lannisterstark 4y ago
    Yes. 1>0
    - joshuamorton 4y ago
      What is "one" and what is "zero"? Are you saying that information can't ever be misleading? Like if I tell you that your boyfriend has been having secret meetings with some woman you don't know, with full knowledge that the secret meetings are because she's a photographer and he's planning to propose, have I improved things by disclosing the information to you in that manner? Were my actions a "net positive"?
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    Yep "Limited Hangouts" are a common disinfo technique
Joeri 4y ago
I did find the article more enlightening than the source code. I always suspected the quality of a tweet did not factor in to its promotion, only its engagement, and now they have confirmed this to be the case. Now I understand better why twitter seems to be filled with people angrily retweeting what I consider to be low quality clickbait tweets. As long as they don’t try to tackle tweet quality at all separately from engagement twitter will remain unappealing to me.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  What does "quality of a tweet" mean, how might you measure it? We pretty much knew this is how all social media works, becuase a) engagement is what they want, why wouldn't they be optimizing for it, and b) how else might you measure 'quality'? Back when this started, I have no trouble believing some well-intentioned engineers thought that engagement was a good proxy for quality. A bunch of users give it the "like", isn't that a collective assessment of quality? Who is to say what quality is, overruling the users in aggregate? I agree it has the negative effects you mention; and I've read lots of people writing about this, it's of course not a new observation. But I agree it's good to have an explanation of what's going on, even when parts of are what we basically knew was happening on all social media networks. confirmed is better than "basically knew", for understanding how these things that effect our experiences (and our society) work.
- dbbk 4y ago
  "Quality of a tweet" is impossible for a computer to understand. That's like asking to quantify the value of a work of art just from the image.
icelancer 4y ago
This is definitely incorrect. Weights for images, links, misspellings, etc are all laid out in the code and have been detailed by multiple people on Twitter already.
cosmojg 4y ago
But why not shower Twitter with praise for doing more than any other social media company in a similar market position? In the best case scenario, we might inspire a transparency arms race. In the worst case, we merely signal that transparency of any kind is rewarded, and that's a good thing if we want more transparency.
- smt88 4y ago
  > But why not shower Twitter with praise for doing more than any other social media company in a similar market position? Because selective disclosure is often propaganda. If a third party had chosen what the release or verified this is what's actually running in production, I would praise them. Considering Elon's incessant lying, self-promotion, and manipulation, it's impossible to be complimentary of this at all. Everything he does is in bad faith.

nonethewiser 4y ago

The funny thing is that angle owes itself to Elon coming through on his promise to open source this. This is a great thing.

deckard1 4y ago
It would also be a total Elon move to confuse the open sourcing of Twitter's internal code with actual transparency. You would need, at a minimum, a neutral third-party audit of Twitter's servers to conclude that the source code we see on GitHub is, in fact, the source code running Twitter. How often will they keep their GitHub repo in sync with their internal code, I wonder. Presumably Twitter uses a version control system. But they scrubbed the history so that's also a point against their "transparency" claims. Without knowing the when and the why of changes you can't understand what you are looking at. People are pointing to that "author_is_elon" without knowing whether that was done before Elon bought Twitter or after. But even then, git history can be faked. > This is a great thing. I disagree. It's the opposite. It provides the illusion of openness without the quality of openness, thus killing the debate once and for all.

HeckFeck 4y ago

I have to admit I am geeking out whilst skimming source code I barely understand.

fanagra32 4y ago

"Opening up"? You must be kidding. Nothing is open there. It's just open-washing. A few nice diagrams, but how the services _actually_ work is still hidden.

hayd 4y ago
> Most of the recommendation algorithm will be made open source today. The rest will follow. So let's wait and see...
mardifoufs 4y ago
If you ignore the hundreds of thousands of LoC... then yeah I guess it's just diagrams? Are you sure you actually looked at the main code repo?

SilverBirch 4y ago

One of the things that makes my spidey sense tingle is when people say oddly sycophantic things about Elon Musk. Twitter is big, it's important. It's not "the most influential social media platform in the world".

corbulo 4y ago
I only see one social media site posts being constantly reposted on global news organizations. Are all of the corporations, world governments, and leaders with tens of millions of followers actually wasting their time by dedicating their social media teams time to twitter instead of focusing on some other social media site thats more influential? Which one is it then? It's quite odd to attribute objective analysis to sycophancy. I intentionally didn't mention him but here you are bringing him up and fulfilling my point. Who is the sycophant?

yurodivuie 4y ago

I'm sure we can all think of examples where a power structure (a company, a country, a prison, a family) invited people in for a supervised tour that was less than honest in its presentation. But really, if people respond to Twitter's actions politically, that response exists within a context that was certainly influenced by Twitter's prior actions.

random_cynic 4y ago

[flagged]

drstewart 4y ago
It's actually shocking to see some of the discussion and understanding of the code here. I'd say the "part-time programmers" qualifier is even generous. Sad to see.
xeromal 4y ago
It seems to be that way but its also in the rules not to complain about that. I do wonder if it's getting worse.
chocolatkey 4y ago
I would agree the quality of posts has gone downhill, and is way too political for my liking, but there's not much other place to go that isn't elitist.
- klodolph 4y ago
  Discord. As much as I hate Discord the platform (and I really do hate it, far more than, say, Twitter), Discord does have a lot of good communities.
  - chocolatkey 4y ago
    I don't think Discord is a substitute for HN. If I know an exact community with a shared interest I want to join then yes, I can find their Discord an join it. But how am I supposed to come across that topic and become interested in the first place? HN (in its ideal form) is a place where I am introduced to a variety of random but potentially interesting technology-related topics, from programming languages to passion projects to lessons in business etc, some of which I will pursue and seek out a community for, and others which I only care about minimally, not enough to want to join a dedicated community for. If you want to compare HN to Discord, I would say that HN is like joining 500 Discord servers that together comprise the type of content discussed and posted about on HN, and every day checking each one's announcements channel, and skimming through general chats. But you still have the issue of being introduced to new topics, for example if you're interested in the AI trends then your selection of Discord servers that comprise what's posted on HN would be dramatically changing in the past few months.

KyleBerezin 4y ago

I would love for the system to be somehow auditable, to verify this algorithm is THE algorithm.

lawgimenez 4y ago

Just read the article and not the comments. Comments here used to be something you learn new stuffs, apparently that is not the case anymore.

mlindner 4y ago

I had to go to the second page to find this. I completely agree. I clicked this thread looking forward to seeing some intelligent discussion of the merits of the source and issues/interesting tidbits, instead I see a bunch of Elon Musk ranting and complaining and pointing out drive-by poor pull requests issues. I really wish the adults would start to talk.

concordDance 4y ago
I would definitely love a techy community that focused on technology like the hackernews of 10 years ago. If you know of one then please link me to it.
- losvedir 4y ago
  lobste.rs is pretty good, in terms of higher tech discussion signal to noise, I think, though it still does have a bit of a political bent. Email me if you want an invite.

DuckFeathers 4y ago

Attacks on Elon has been growing since he started calling out corruption.