/**
* These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are
* serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users.
* This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes
* that negatively impacts one group over others.
*/
... Metrics tracked in AB test. So even if it's not explicitly encoded in the algo (or implicitly through some of the features plugged in), they'll pick the winning cell as long as it doesn't hurt Elon's metrics (I'm just parroting the comment you quoted).
It doesn't have to be in the algorithm for the systems to be tweaked to please Elon vanity metrics.
[I've been running lots of ML AB tests over the years, some in organizations of similar size & complexity as Twitter]
That lines up with reporting from Casey Newton a few days ago where a handful of VIPs e.g. Musk, LeBron James, AOC were being used as weather vanes to understand what the algorithm was doing.
It definitely isn't just metrics. Any algorithm change that negatively affected Musk was clearly not going live.
> I suspect that there was another name there before
Who ? Musk is unique in being obsessed with being liked and relevant.
All of the other social CEOs including Porag and Jake have never really cared that much. And none of them participated in contributing content anything close to what Musk does.
Why is Musk obsessed with being liked? There was a hoax last month about the algorithm being tweaked to make everyone view Elon’s tweets which was provably false.
It is very much likely to be the CEO a company wanting to understand his companies product.
> a hoax last month about the algorithm being tweaked to make everyone view Elon’s tweets
Didn't this just reveal that they're A/B testing on Musk's tweet performance? At the very least they're avoiding regressions, and I guess any incidental improvements to it won't be reversed, so isn't it fundamentally the same? Unless we're taking the word "everyone" literally, I guess.
I don’t remember the specifics but I think there was a case where they accidentally amplified his tweets too much and they did reverse that change. He tweeted about it but I think it was a couple months back so it would take a bit to find.
Yes tabloids, both known for making up stories and sensationalism, all sourced from the same single blog article, easily confirmable looking as false at the view count for Elon’s tweets, explained by engineers as exactly what we saw here (logging output not changing output) and I don’t believe you re: seeing his tweets despite blocking him. Nobody else had that happen.
We can't comment on why, but there's no rational way to watch his behavior and assume he isn't obsessed with being liked. He constantly tweets about his own tweets performance, makes humiliating appearances on stages, and pretty much terrified that someone might do something 1/100000th as awful to him as he and his family have done to others.
> He constantly tweets about his own tweets performance, makes humiliating appearances on stages, and pretty much terrified that someone might do something 1/100000th as awful to him as he and his family have done to others.
Ah so he makes jokes, and is well known enough to need security precautions. This makes him “a whiny baby”. Solid argument.
The guy is literally creating the next gen intercontinental ballistic missile system and military delivery for the US, but according to HN it’s whiny for him to need security. Right.
Oh and I forgot, he also helps ukranians vs the Russians. Not a good idea if you want a risk free life.
Someone wants to measure their business after paying what was a reasonable figure when they offered it, but that became overpriced once the market changed.
Sounds like fairly rational behaviour.
HN isn’t a site for making unfounded personal attacks on others.
His offer included a meme number and was overvalued even in April '22 (by 54% !), claimed he was going to combat the spam bots, and then tried to back out, citing the same spam bots. The event was described as a "hostile takeover" at the time [0], a term which has stuck all the way through to most summaries of the event [1]
A hostile takeover has a specific meaning. It's simply a takeover attempt where a buyer approaches shareholders instead of the company's management, this is usually (if not always) because the latter fails. And it always comes with a premium and drama, precisely because it goes against the wishes of the management of a company. And the premium is also logical because presumably shareholders of a company "believe" in that company, and an outsider now wants to take it over. A good example [1] is when Inbev (massive multinational beer company) purchased Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser). It made the purchase of Twitter look downright cordial, but was probably outside of most of our bubbles.
Yea, to make people buy your company you need to offer a premium. He backed out saying he was lied to about the current level of fake accounts, which is also reasonable if that was the case.
It would have been reasonable if he had performed due diligence and came to that conclusion, but he explicitly chose to waive due diligence, and then tried to renege anyway.
As a person who occasionally uses Twitter, but has no interest in having an account, he has dramatically improved the experience. Before he took over it was made impossible to view replies from a user, users were spammed with popup login dialogues that could not be closed with a single click, and more. I expect Twitter probably drove more people away from the site with all this nonsense, than they coerced into registering.
I also think many of the changes to make Twitter more open, such as now open sourcing the recommendation algorithm, publishing view counts (which indirectly makes it clear when something or somebody has been shadow banned), and more are all big steps forward in creating a much better and open service for all. Really most of every change he's pursued since taking over Twitter, from my perspective at least, seems to have been big steps forward.
He accused Twitter of being politically biased to the left and suppressing tweets, so he bought it to "allow free speech", except in his mind free speech apparently equates to being able to promote right wing propaganda.
As a platform, sure it can be better, and it wasn't exactly under the best management before (although the Twitter file leak actually made the old management look better than everyone thought). But lets not pretend that Musk is in this for the platform - he wants control of information to boost Republican leaders because in his mind, he is the savior of human race, so the best leadership is that which allows him to do the things he wants to do.
> He accused Twitter of being politically biased to the left and suppressing tweets, so he bought it to "allow free speech", except in his mind free speech apparently equates to being able to promote right wing propaganda.
I'm not a fan of Elon at all at this point. That said, this is more an indictment of the tech industry than Twitter alone. Most employees are some form of left, many of those employees sit on committees, have outsized wealth compared to the average citizen, donate accordingly, the executives among them have power, etc and tech plays an outsized roll on our lives now. This was made a lot more evident when Twitters head of trust and safety was interviewed and she was unable to identify, or had let situations go on, that were offensive to people you'd commonly call right where anything that was offensively to what people would commonly call left was getting combed over and at times over enforced. I'd also say that my perception of her was more that she had large gaps rather than outright hate. The biggest one that comes to mind is "#learntocode" which a bunch of journalists not only wrote articles but also used that hash tag on people working blue collar jobs, such as coal mining, that were under threat at the time. It's an isolated example, but that hash tag stayed promoted for quite a while.
This isn't to say that right-leaning oppression and left-leaninf oppression at categorically the same or have the same categorical effects. It does point to that we have larger class issues at play.
Sure, except Twitter doesn't have free speech. Twitter can and does issues bans for thing said, notably in the Kanye case, and when Elon banned the elonjet account.
It's either free speech absolutionism, or not free speech. If you claim you are for free speech in the moral sense of the word, you have to let everything be posted.
As soon as you start removing things, it becomes your version of controlled narrative. And there is nothing wrong with just that, because of course you want to minimize potential damage. But then you have to be responsible for the things you let slide.
So when Twitter allows right wing rhetoric, a.k.a conspiracy theories about Nancy pelocies husband, pushed by the CEO, or things like Fauci gain of function research, it's clearly a controlled narrative.
I absolutely will criticize Elon for his behavior around the twitter buyout. He's handled layoff/firing decisions extremely poorly. He's alienated a large portion of the ad buyers. These are not unfounded attacks.
Elon does not need you going around personally trying to shut down other people's discussion. That's cult like behavior.
It was going to be tough to cut Twitter regardless of who did it. Advertisers were pulling out before the deal was even closed, mainly because of Tiktok.
How are the people that disagree with you in this thread trying to shut down your discussion?
If the “normal way” of doing things worked then Twitter wouldn’t have been in such a bad state when he took over in the first place. An unconventional approach brings more risk but can also end up being worth it.
Would I do things differently if it were up to me? Sure, but it isn’t, and I can at least appreciate that they are trying to move quickly & try different things. I’m reserving my judgement for whether or not this approach works in the long run.
Twitter wasn't in that bad of state. If anything, it just needed tweaking to unlock the value it should have had given it's place in the media. Now, Twitter is in a terrible state financially given the debt Musk loaded onto it for the purchase.
The problem is Musk is learning the hard way when taking something over is that the old crew is never as dumb as he hoped they were, and he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.
A company that is 16 years old, still not profitable, & with no concrete plans to achieve profitability is totally dysfunctional and probably wouldn’t survive a high interest rate + likely recessionary environment anyways.
> If the “normal way” of doing things worked then Twitter wouldn’t have been in such a bad state when he took over in the first place.
The normal ways of measuring the business, namely EBIDITA, DAU, MAU .., worked. They reliably reported the state of the business. Elon Musk was the only person in the financial market who looked at those measures and interpreted them as meaning “add US$1B annual debt service.”
That is "measuring their business" only if one of the main goals for their business is for it to promote them; because this is exactly what they measure here.
It’s the CEO being able to write something and see where it ends up after going through the pipeline. It does not increase views. I can repeat this, other can repeat this, or you can look at the code.
> which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?
When you run an A/B test you randomly divide your users into groups, one (treatment) getting the new behavior and one (control) getting the current production behavior. So your question doesn't make much sense?
Depends on the question. If you want to answer a question like “does change X increase engagement?” then a straight A/B test works. But if you want to answer one like “does change X increase engagement while (favoring/not favoring) group 1 over group 2?”, then an A/B test plus measuring groups 1 and 2 will not work without a control group, because without controls you don’t know if any changes to engagement for your measured groups are significant. There is some threshold of change to the engagement for the measured groups which is too small to be significant, and you should ignore results that only measure that noise.
I think a lot of it is lies... I used to observe that tweeting anything remotely political went straight to trending timelines, so did tweets about crypto and NFTs...
I doubt that Twitter and most of these social platforms are driven by Ai... Maintaining and changing complex algos could not be done on a rapid pace like what occurs now... I think Twitter has moderators, and scripts that control everything, and it can be more easily adjusted to tweak what is visible on the platform based on whatever agenda they want to represent (politics, revenue, PR/damage control).
Twitter frequently bends the rules to serve celebrities, politics, and sponsors and for that they need to be able to quickly adjust scripts. True Ai is meant to function on it's own with minimal intervention, and therein a simple change to a massive logic scheme would completely FUBAR everything.
I think there are rooms full of people that filter and either promote or suppress posts on Twitter every day, namely suppressing any tweets critical of the platform and it's owner... I've noticed that at night time hours, moderation of Tweets is less restrictive as a cue to what goes on there.
There are certain topics that are not moderated as heavily as others (3d Design and other non-controversial topics), and some topics (for example music and porn) that are restricted heavily visibility-wise because they force people to run ads to rank in trending (because it generates a lot of opportunistic money for Twitter as a platform).
Users that are critical of the platform and Elon and his allies (for example) can easily be neutered by moderators and put on shadow ban for any period of time in order to preserve the illusion of calm concerning Twitter operations. Complaints about Twitter only become visible when the majority of the audience tweets about problems (as that can't be moderated out without exposing moderation).
It's pretty much all smoke and mirrors there in order to maintain order in my opinion, and it's pretty much futile and torturous to people who just want to create and seize opportunity for their business without spending tons of money on platform marketing...
There is absolutely no reason to believe there was another Single user getting this treatment before. The Elon-case was just copy & pasted as an ego-stroking hack.
You would think someone forcing themselves up to the top of a feed designed to catch your attention would be a little bit more memorable than “I had to look up what he was even called”. You didn’t even know what his title was, ffs.
I’m sure your simping for Elon is highly appreciated. Maybe he’ll let you taste his boots next.
The code under discussion has nothing to do with forcing anyone or anything to the top of a feed. It’s entire observable effect is to _measure changes in engagement_. Any use beyond that is speculative.
However, if you believe that it was to be used as part of a system for increasing engagement, then you are asserting that it is a system with no control groups, which is a stupid mistake that wouldn’t be made by an undergraduate taking their first statistics class. They wouldn’t make that mistake even on the first day of that class, because they took a class in statistics in high school!
We all know said code does exist and just wasn’t part of the released source. It was very clearly used, although I know it goes against the cult so you yourself can never dare utter those words.
But no, please, go off on your tangent that is not at all centered in reality.
Such a system, which certainly exists, was also made extremely quickly. We all know the timeline. We all have seen the rants and then the immediate effect of manual changes made to please the rants. I could easily see control groups going out the window when your boss expects their tweets to be prioritized yesterday.
I also like how confident you are in a company’s ability after they explicitly laid off and fired the majority of its staff. Generally speaking, when that happens, people lose confidence rather than gain it, but here you are proving us all of wrong. Gold star for you, maybe you’ll even get the other boot now!
I’m sure it feels so rewarding to simp for a man who will never even look in your general direction, let alone talk to you or know all the great things you said about him and his companies.
Yea, I’m not willing to engage in any conversation with someone who uses ad hominem attacks. I should have noticed your previous one; I can only conclude that I wasn’t paying enough attention.
No. Not a chance. Elon’s claims of mismanagement at Twitter have merit, though not nearly as much as he think, but the one thing that’s undeniable is that the previous “owner” (well, the CEO), is an adult that didn’t care about this shit.
It is usually better for major criminals to confess and turn themselves in too. "I bet" doesn't read "it is morally better." And why jump to compare publicly vs privately doing it instead of doing it vs not doing it?
Why, exactly, should the CEO of Twitter care about their own tweets getting maximum attention? If anything, this takes engineering effort away from customers because special implementations like "is_elon" have to be added.
Isn't it natural for the CEO wonder about his own tweets, and use those as a proxy for the function of the platform as a whole--esp as relates to "VIP" tweeters who Twitter arguably wants to keep happy. In fairness to Elon, his repeated inquiries about his own tweeted shined light on several legitimate bugs in their algorithm affecting VIPs.
No, it isn’t a problem if the a CEO of Twitter doesn’t care about their tweets. The proper task of any CEO is maintaining the company as an immortal entity.
If the general public cares about the CEO’s tweets, then necessarily there will be a danger that the death of the CEO will ignite a crisis in the general public; e.g. Steve Jobs at Apple.
I never suggested the CEO needs to be the star tweeter. What I am saying is that the CEO needs to be a tweeter, i.e. personally invested in his/her company's product. Companies with CEOs who don't give a shit about about their product/users tend not last long as "immortal entities".
So many unnecessarily cynical takes here. Let's say you were in charge of a large legacy system that some segment of customers complain about it not working for them as well as other segments. How would you know whether their complaints are valid unless you measured it? You have to know first. So measure it.
Yeah, but then what do you do after you measure it? Nothing? No, you make decisions differently so as not to offend whoever is part of the criteria. For example, can we agree that we don't want an "author_is_flat_earther" flag? Because who gives a shit if Twitter makes a change to their recommendation engine that negatively affects flag earthers? Just because something is only used for A/B testing doesn't make it completely inert.
You can dismiss the complaint without measurement if you are confident in two things:
1. Your system does nothing to actually segment this specific group by their identity.
2. You are confident that the systems you have set up to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior are accurate.
If both of those are true, you know that even if the group is being disproportionately negatively impacted by some form of recommendation/moderation, that it is only because that group disproportionately participates in behavior that is bad for the platform. That isn't a problem. It would actually be worse for the platform overall if you did anything to appease that group.
> ...it is only because that group disproportionately participates in behavior that is bad for the platform. That isn't a problem.
That is exactly what Twitter's stance has been all along (in the pre-Elon era) and it IS a problem for the product because people being silenced due to their own bad behavior (example: misgendering transgender people) feel an injustice is being done. The rule-makers get to set the range of acceptable discourse on Twitter and those to the right of center have felt unfairly disadvantaged by the way it was done in the past.
Over time this has eroded trust in the product. Just because people aren't being labeled and ranked based on whether they are red team or blue team, the people deciding what "good" and "bad" behavior looks like on the platform have the power to disproportionately impact these groups.
Data isn't going to tell Twitter whether to allow or disallow misgendering people. You either think that is bad behavior that shouldn't be allowed or you don't. Disallowing it is not disadvantaging Republicans. It is stopping behavior Twitter has deemed is bad for the platform. As I said in point 2 above, either Twitter is confident in those decisions or not. Data is worthless when it comes to a moral decision like that.
And if we accept hat Twitter believes (or more accurately did believe) that misgendering people is wrong, who cares whether people who want to do it feel an injustice is being done? Would anyone say that deleting spam is an injustice to spammers? You break the rules and you get punished.
> Data isn't going to tell Twitter whether to allow or disallow misgendering people. You either think that is bad behavior that shouldn't be allowed or you don't. Disallowing it is not disadvantaging Republicans.
If one of the defining characteristics of a political/religious/cultural group is having a particular ethical view, then enforcing a contrary ethical view against them is disadvantaging them and discriminating against them. Now, it may in some cases be morally and/or legally permissible, or even justifiable, discrimination, but it still is discrimination, and it is still disadvantaging them.
> Would anyone say that deleting spam is an injustice to spammers? You break the rules and you get punished.
Worldwide, many jurisdictions have laws against discrimination on the basis of religion; although it is less common, some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief. A law prohibiting discrimination on some ground, is evidence that some people believe discrimination on that ground to be immoral. By contrast, I've never heard anyone suggest that spammers should constitute a "protected class", and I'm not aware of any jurisdiction which treats them as one.
Some people believe that there is nothing morally wrong with discrimination on the basis of religion and/or politics. Other people think there is something morally wrong with it, but if there is a conflict between the right to be free from religious and/or political discrimination, and the rights of LGBT people, the rights of the latter morally ought to take priority. Spam is irrelevant to that ethical debate.
>If one of the defining characteristics of a political/religious/cultural group is having a particular ethical view, then enforcing a contrary ethical view against them is disadvantaging them and discriminating against them.
I don't think misgendering people is a "defining characteristic" of Republicans and if that is, the Republican Party is in a pretty sad state considering all the bigger problems in the world. And if that qualifies as a "defining characteristic", there are plenty of other counter examples of society accepting discrimination as you define it. Banning polygamy would be discriminatory against Mormons is one. You could even argue that a full abortion ban is discriminatory against Jewish people.
>some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief.
Notably not in the US where Twitter is based and were most of these complaints originate.
> I don't think misgendering people is a "defining characteristic" of Republicans and if that is, the Republican Party is in a pretty sad state considering all the bigger problems in the world.
Some religious conservatives are convinced that referring to a transgender person by their preferred pronoun is a sin, even a serious one, for which they will be judged by God. Even religious conservatives who don't personally subscribe to that viewpoint, see it as one they are morally obliged to respect and defend. [0] While that doesn't describe all Republicans, obviously there is a significant overlap between Republicans and religious conservatives. And for a devout religious person, their religious beliefs are one of their defining characteristics–they are a huge part of their life, even their very identity, who they understand themselves to be.
Even those conservatives who think it is okay to use a person's preferred pronouns, will adopt a much more restricted stance on the topic than many trans activists. Many will insist on it must be voluntary rather than mandatory, and defend the freedom of conscience of those who take a more conservative stance than they do – which is an expression of both religious and political beliefs about respect for individual freedom and conscience.
Some conservatives are willing to use a friend/colleague/acquaintance's preferred pronouns when interacting with them, but will refuse to do the same for a criminal in the news. Look at Wikipedia to see people who vehemently insist that you must use the preferred pronouns of a dead school shooter or executed murderer – and even if the family of the victims publicly objected to it, that wouldn't change their mind.
> Banning polygamy would be discriminatory against Mormons is one. You could even argue that a full abortion ban is discriminatory against Jewish people.
Prohibitions on discrimination are never absolute, they always permit exceptions – so the existence of exceptions is not an argument against the existence of the prohibition. And whatever the merits of those specific examples, they are actions, not speech. Society traditionally gives religious minorities far greater latitude with respect to their beliefs about what they can and can't say, than their beliefs about actions which aren't predominantly expressive in character. Jehovah's Witnesses who believe it is a sin to salute flags or recite pledges of allegiance, Quakers who believe it is a sin to swear oaths, etc.
> >some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief.
> Notably not in the US where Twitter is based and were most of these complaints originate.
While the US currently lacks federal laws banning political discrimination, state and local laws sometimes do ban it, see [1]. Some of those laws are specific to certain contexts (e.g. housing or employment), and so may not be applicable to a social media platform such as Twitter. However, given increasing concern among conservatives about political discrimination, it seems rather likely that we'll see more state laws enacted on that topic in the future.
> Some religious conservatives are convinced that referring to a transgender person by their preferred pronoun is a sin, even a serious one, for which they will be judged by God.
I don't expect their empathy. I expect them to experience consequences for their actions. The consequences can stop when the actions stop and aren't expected to be repeated. I expect some subset of them to have an understanding of cause and effect, and thus learn. (If the lesson they learn is "change actions" rather than "change mindset producing actions", that'll do.) I expect the rest to complain about experiencing consequences for their actions.
> I don't expect their empathy. I expect them to experience consequences for their actions. The consequences can stop when the actions stop and aren't expected to be repeated.
Or, they can turn around and try to impose negative consequences on the people who are trying to impose negative consequences on them. Which, one might argue, is exactly what is happening in several state legislatures in the US right now. And then the fight goes on until one side wins, or there is some sort of "peace deal".
That's what happens with irreconcilable values differences, yes.
But I wouldn't frame it as cause-and-effect like that: one side doesn't attack the other as a response to experiencing consequences; they attack the other pervasively at every opportunity, and sometimes experience consequences for doing so.
If one side believes they are completely innocent and the other side are just plain evil – and the other side believes the same things right back – isn't that how civil wars start?
We have a democracy precisely to avoid such things. I'd prefer the strategy of "decide to actually start winning at every opportunity"; it would be a novel change in strategy.
Let's stop treating this as "maybe there's a way to convince people", understand that there is no way to convince some people, and instead just win. Win, and keep winning, and use those wins to eliminate things like voter suppression and gerrymandering, and then never lose again.
Try as hard as you might, there's no guarantee you can win. What happens to "win, and keep winning... and then never lose again", if you never "win" the first time? The US political system is rigged (arguably by design) to favour conservatives. To successfully undo that rigging requires not just winning narrowly, it requires winning decisively. But how do you win decisively when the system is rigged against you? It might be about to get even more rigged–if the upcoming SCOTUS decision in Moore v Harper embraces the "independent state legislature theory", all efforts to prevent gerrymandering by state legislatures would be dead in the water. So, what if you don't win, what if you lose–what then do you do?
And even if your wildest dreams come true–if you win too big, the other side may turn around and say "democracy isn't working for us any more". If it gets to the point that a significant minority of the population (say 20-40%) no longer believes that democracy is in their best interests, democracy's days are numbered. Especially if that significant minority has a great deal of wealth, influence and power. It could end in the peaceful negotiation of a "national divorce"–and there are many worst ways it could end than that.
If it were easy it would be done already. But the important strategy is to make sure it only takes winning decisively once, rather than winning decisively and leaving room for getting undermined in the future. Priority #1 with the next majority should be eliminating voter suppression, eliminating gerrymandering, supporting universal vote-by-mail, and all other factors that prevent the outcome of democracy from actually reflecting what the majority of people want.
> the other side may turn around and say "democracy isn't working for us any more".
They do that already, whether it's true or not. That's not a reason to decide to lose.
How do you compromise with people who use that as a way to take advantage of you and refuse compromise in return though? The result of 'let's live with them and treat their actions as good faith' has consistently been 'we get screwed'. What do you propose?
Am I misunderstanding? Are you suggesting that penalising those who misgender transgender people is unfairly disadvantaging people whose political views are right of centre?
It's not about what I personally believe or think is unfair. It's about what Republicans (broadly speaking) believe. There is massive resentment from people on the right who think the Twitter rules unfairly elevated some political opinions as good/correct/acceptable while treating others as unacceptable.
The handling of trans issues is just one example to illustrate the problem here. People on the left think trans rights are human rights while people on the right think a lot of trans issues should be open for discussion, legislation, persecution, etc. I think if we're being intellectually honest most would acknowledge that as a country we are far from consensus on many of the details here (bathrooms, girls sports, etc), and yet Twitter's rules and enforcement actions behaved as if the leftist view of transgender people is the only valid and permissible view.
The handling of January 6 and the banning of Trump is another example.
These things are Rorschach tests; people apply their biases and reach very different conclusions about what should be done. I don't claim to know the solution, I'm just trying to sketch out the problem with the way things were creating a climate where a big segment of the US felt unwelcome and resentful toward the platform.
This presents a problem for the platform, since you can't afford to alienate large double digit percents of the population if your mandate from shareholders is to grow mDAU by any means necessary. In that context, having some metrics tracking in place to measure the impact of algorithm changes on democrats and republicans to see whether impact is disproportionate is a completely rational thing to do.
While I can understand there may be debate around various trans issues purposefully calling someone something when they’ve politely asked you to call them something else isn’t up for much debate. Seems like common courtesy/politeness.
I see your point about losing users potentially but I would argue that Twitter’s intense focus on the US (as shown by the democrat/republican metrics) and trying to placate everyone is actually a negative for their business. There’s billions of other internet users outside the US. Shifting focus to serve them instead of focussing intensely on trying to please both sides in the US (and failing) would probably deliver better value for their shareholders.
> purposefully calling someone something when they’ve politely asked you to call them something else isn’t up for much debate. Seems like common courtesy/politeness.
It can be if the thing they're asking for is perceived to be untrue and the person being asked is a big stickler for that sort of thing. If you'll excuse me using metaphors on this sensitive topic: if someone wants to be referred to as "His Majesty" but is not actually the king then while many nice people will indulge him[1], some who care a great deal about the "correct" usage of noble titles won't.
But what if you flip the coin? What if the person being asked really, really thinks that the other person is a pissface, and is a big stickler for calling people he perceives to be pissfaces as such? Surely we can all agree that allowing them to follow their ideas will lead to bad discourse.
And it doesn't even have to be such a crass example. What if a person is legally called Robert, but he's gone by Bob his whole life - is the stickler right if they insist on calling them by their legally given name?
> Surely we can all agree that allowing them to follow their ideas will lead to bad discourse.
I actually think that if someone genuinely thinks someone else is a pissface then it's their right to call the other person that. I also think that excluding such a person from your conversations may be sensible. This applies to pronouns too.
Sure, is somebody arguing for something differently? It's strange to me how often people repeat "oh, but they are allowed to", when that's irrelevant to the topic at hand.
It's the difference between "what you're doing is wrong" and "what you're doing isn't compatible with our vibe, so you're not welcome".
I think the main difference between my faction and the main trans activist faction is we don't think honest misgendering (done due to an earnestly held belief about the sex of the other person and some moral convictions against white lies) should be a firing offense.
> I think the main difference between my faction and the main trans activist faction is we don't think honest misgendering (done due to an earnestly held belief about the sex of the other person and some moral convictions against white lies) should be a firing offense.
This seems counter to what you wrote earlier:
> I also think that excluding such a person from your conversations may be sensible.
Let's say your a customer of a company, and an employee "honestly misgenders you", even after you've repeatedly asked them not to. What can the company and you do to exclude them from your conversations, without firing them?
Should a company also accept a racist employee calling customers the n-word? Is it acceptable to fire somebody for that?
This is where user options should allow for that. If being called a different gender is so bad just block the people that do that. The problem is you might need that word in general discourse as well. So you can't just create a rule that blocks everyone who says "He" just like you can block the n-word. The problem is with the person assuming every single person in the general public should treat them as a friend and getting offended when a label that is applied to half of the population (neither as a positive or negative, merely as a descriptor) is somehow that bad of a thing.
> This is where user options should allow for that. If being called a different gender is so bad just block the people that do that.
In your comment, you said that we can just block the n-word. Why? Should it not also be up to the users offended by it to block those using it? I don't think people using the word should be on the platform, but I don't know where you'd draw the line.
> So you can't just create a rule that blocks everyone who says "He" just like you can block the n-word.
I don't think I've ever seen a single person suggest this.
> The problem is with the person assuming every single person in the general public should treat them as a friend and getting offended when a label that is applied to half of the population (neither as a positive or negative, merely as a descriptor) is somehow that bad of a thing.
I'm not sure what situation you're presenting here. Trans persons usually don't assume that the general public should treat them as a friend. What they assume is that "if I tell somebody I would like to be referred to with female pronouns they should do so" is a very normal thing to ask of somebody. I'm male, but if somebody erroneously called me female, I'd correct them. If they kept calling me female, I'd try to get them removed from the social situation I'm in. Why is this any different for a trans person?
> (neither as a positive or negative, merely as a descriptor)
This is a pretty bad line of argumentation. For racist people, the n-word is also just a descriptor, and they don't understand why they're not allowed to use it.
In the end, referring to somebody in a way they don't like is always a demonstration of power. By doing so, you're saying "it is okay for me to make you feel less welcome, because I won't suffer negative consequences from doing so". The only harm in making people feel accepted is an imaginary one.
> In the end, referring to somebody in a way they don't like is always a demonstration of power. By doing so, you're saying "it is okay for me to make you feel less welcome, because I won't suffer negative consequences from doing so".
Well said. I know someone who is a vegetarian and their old boss always referred to them as vegan. Seems minor because neither word is offensive, but after correcting the boss multiple times, she realized it was just him asserting his power. A prick thing to do.
What does it matter to me if their belief is honest or not? I will still feel unwelcome, maybe even more so. Does it matter to a black person if the other guy really thinks "he is an n-word"?
>It's not about what I personally believe or think is unfair. It's about what Republicans (broadly speaking) believe.
No, it is about what Twitter believes. That was what I was referring to with point 2 in my original comment. Not every customer complaint is valid. It is ok to hear a complaint and dismiss it without further investigation. Twitter doesn't have some obligation to get all of society to think its rules are fair.
It is fine for a company to tell some potential customers to "fuck off" as long as that company isn't discriminating against a protected class. Twitter isn't discriminating against a protected class here.
If Twitter thinks misgendering people is wrong, it is impossible to come to an agreement with a group that think properly gendering people is wrong without Twitter compromising its own morals. Twitter is allowed to stick to its own morals and tell the people who disagree to "fuck off".
> Twitter's rules and enforcement actions behaved as if the leftist view of transgender people is the only valid and permissible view.
Twitter has changed in that regard since Musk took over. You can pretty much say what you like on trans issues now, as long as it doesn't break other rules. Loads of gender critical feminists have had their accounts restored in the past few months - usually having been suspended for 'misgendering' or some such nonsense.
> There is massive resentment from people on the right who think the Twitter rules unfairly elevated some political opinions as good/correct/acceptable while treating others as unacceptable.
Would it surprise you to find out that this resentment is in fact, conveniently manufactured, politically useful outrage? Because it's simply not true on its face, and the only thing we need to know to understand this is to see that it took Trump launching a coup to be banned on the platform. He violated the TOS every day, and he was allowed to spread his message to his millions of followers by Twitter. You want to talk about unfairly elevating political opinions? Trump used the platform to violate citizens' first amendment rights, and we had to take him to court to get those rights back. Twitter didn't do shit to protect us from him.
But it's not just Trump. It's right wing political opinions writ large. Far and away from sinking right wing conservative voices, Twitter research found they actually amplify right wing voices in every one of their top 6 countries except Germany [1]. Yes, that includes the US.
Is your mind blown? Have you heard of this once? I bet all you've heard from Musk and right wing politicians is that Twitter is going hard on conservatives and deplatforming them. Blocking their messages. Being unfair to conservatives and right wing opinions.
Yet what has actually happened? Twitter was actually deferential to conservative voices! It boosted conservatives and right wing voices at the expense of liberals. How did this happen? This is conservative messaging 101: complain about bias loudly enough and the other side will go so far out of their way to seem unbiased, they will be biased in the other direction. Conservatives managed to complain so loud about Twitter being biased against them that you not only believe it, but reality is actually completely the opposite.
Folks like Jordan Peterson would like you to think so, yes.
Of course, the man is essentially a walking “old man yells at clouds” meme at this point, so I’m not sure you should take anything he says with any merit.
Sometimes. Consciously using language that you know will offend another person and being uncaring of their feelings is shitty behaviour (unless you have a very good reason), using language that comes naturally and you think accurately describes the situation is neutral behaviour, making the effort to use validating language that people prefer is good behaviour.
There's also the communication accuracy issue. Words can carry a host of connotations and implications (e.g. pronouns carry information (in the information theory sense of shifting the probability distribution) regarding how deep someone's voice sounds) and using words that give the listener an inaccurate impression is a cost, however minor.
How much information is transmitted (and thus how big the "lie" is) depends on how different the male and female probability distributions (along many axes) are and how different they are to the transman and transwoman distributions. Which is obviously a very complex thing to figure out (are men and women identical other than outer appearance in X society? Obviously not, but how different they are is very unknown, for any X).
I don't know why people need to make this topic so complicated.
Imagine you meet someone named William. Maybe you become familiar with them and call them "Will" and they correct you and say they only want to go by "William". From that point forward, calling them "Will", "Willy", "Bill", "Billy", "Liam", or anything else besides "William" is rude. It doesn't matter that society at large thinks those names are all acceptable alternatives. It doesn't matter what is on this person's birth certificate. It doesn't matter the reason behind their request. An individual person told you their preferences and you ignored them. That is rude.
Pronouns are the same. You call people by what they want to be called. Anything else is rude to that individual.
The name analogy doesn't really work because in most societies names don't have very strong connotations. In ones where they DO have strong connotations (e.g. tribe/clan last names where different cland have different cultures) the analogy works, but most of us don't live in such societies.
If engagement on the tweets of that user goes down after a change has been implemented, you can roll back the change to prevent that user from being negatively impacted.
What if engagements around that user naturally declined, perhaps due to that user going off the deep end. Wouldn’t this just serve to bias the algorithm toward propping up the exposure of that user? Do they even care about the control so long as that user’s engagement is up and to the right?
Come on think this through. It’s trivial to tell the difference between a gradual and natural decline and a drastic decline immediately after rolling out a change. Especially when the change is rolled out region by region and only exists in regions running the update. You have to be able to measure the effect of changes and the most popular accounts are the obvious low hanging fruit for doing that.
I expect they're tracking the red team/blue team metrics because of the political shitstorm that's been the GOP's assertions they're being silenced by The Algorithm.
The fallacy of false equivalence systematized in code.
Now one side can spew as much disinfo and incitement to violence as it likes, and any algorithm change that prevents this shit from getting amplified will be rejected as bias.
This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. It was reported years ago that Twitter was unable to cut down on hate speech because the automated systems they developed triggered too many [debatably false] positives on Republican politicians and that was bad for the company's reputation. If Twitter wanted to prevent future code changes from impacting that approach, there needed to be something like this in the code or tests.
I don't know what specific documents you think did that, but "comprehensively" is absolutely an awful way to describe the Twitter Files. They were anything but "comprehensive". In actuality, they were an excellent example of how easy it is to lie using partial truths. For example, highlighting all the times Twitter took moderation recommendations from a Democratic campaign looks a lot worse if you hide any time they took moderation from Republican campaigns. A simple look at the specific journalists that were given access to Twitter documents and the strings attached to that access reveals that the Twitter Files were not about transparency. They were an ideological play and nothing more. If Musk wanted true transparency, he would have given wider access to more documents or just released them all like Jack Dorsey requested.
Could you please point out the list of moderation recommendations from Republican campaigns that were actually accepted and carried out? The only ones that were revealed so far were of the following types:
1. requests to un-ban or un-suspend right-wing personas
2. removal of explicit death threats.
3. Anything against the vaccine - even actual, scientific data.
From the twitter files, the Twitter team that was wholly left-leaning spent significant time and debate looking for the mildest of excuses to ban right-wing politicians, building black lists for them and even gloating happily as they managed to kick them off. Not much doubt about that - actually no one has even denied that. There were several hearings also in the house judiciary where they even confirmed the same.
(Interestingly, there was pressure applied on Matt Taibbi to either "shut up" or relinquish all his sources to law enforcement. Also, as a form of indirect pressure to rattle him, US tax agents visited his house the VERY DAY he would testify before US Congress stating that his tax returns had been rejected due to identity theft concerns - despite him having the electronic receipt which showed it being accepted.)
>Could you please point out the list of moderation recommendations from Republican campaigns that were actually accepted and carried out?
That is exactly my point. I can't because none were released. That is not a reason to assume they don't exist. You are assuming full transparency in a situation with only partial transparency.
WHEN THE WHITE House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases
> there is also no reason to beleive they do exist.
Proof of reason to believe they do exist.
Furthermore, the office of the president, the FBI, the Government making a request to limit the free speech of a citizen is entirely different from Joe Blow in the street making a request.
If anything it gives credence to the theory that while both dem and repub lawmakers request Twitter to remove embarrassing tweets (obvious), Twitter pre-Elon only answered the dem's requests.
Twitter admits bias in algorithm for rightwing politicians and news outlets[1]
The research found that in six out of seven countries, apart from Germany, tweets from rightwing politicians received more amplification from the algorithm than those from the left; right-leaning news organisations were more amplified than those on the left; and generally politicians’ tweets were more amplified by an algorithmic timeline than by the chronological timeline.
According to a 27-page research document [2], Twitter found a “statistically significant difference favouring the political right wing” in all the countries except Germany.
Twitter admits it was boosting right wing accounts over left wing accounts. It treated right wing twitter users who violated its own terms of service better than regular users because of their position as conservative leaders. Trump himself was boosted and promoted while he violated Twitter TOS. It took him using Twitter to wage a coup against the US government for them to ban him. So yeah, there's more than a little reason to believe that there's evidence at Twitter of them boosting right wing accounts.
And PS: Notice that this research by Twitter is never mentioned by Musk or in the Twitter files. They're trying very hard to memory hole this report, and it seems like it's worked on you.
But that was published while the pro-Democrat establishment goons were in charge of Twitter, so of course they would say that because they wanted you to beleive they weren't favouring the left. It's hardly a reiable source. Same applies to Musk-era of course.
In the end, we accept the things we agree with, and discredit the ones we prefer not to believe. Human nature.
As I said, we don't need to know anything internal about Twitter to know for a fact that they bent over backwards to elevate extremist right wing voices. Because they elevated the most important extremist voice for 4 years as he violated the terms of use for their platform. In effect, we all had one TOS, and there was a different, more permissive TOS for the leader of the US MAGA-right wing movement, the most extreme version of right wing politics in America. That's blatant, confirmed, irrefutable, systematic bias and special treatment for conservatives on Twitter, pre Musk.
In case you want to discount the Twitter report as a false flag, here's a report from NYU that independently confirmed Twitter is biased toward conservatives. It also found the same for Facebook: https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/bias-report-release-page
You really can't just blanket claim that all research from a university is politically biased, even if you feel American universities in general are biased. Come on now, we're here for discourse that's a little more nuanced than that I hope.
Since all you're bringing to the discussion at this point is a comic, I think that's all there is to say.
Yes, discussion over, you learned nothing, you'll carry on defending your fixed beliefs, and you got in a cheap comment about a serious comic. Well done.
I don't see an unbiased way to tell which "side" releases more disinformation and incitement to violence. Even deciding what counts as disinformation is hard (e.g. does it have to be literally false or just cause false beliefs in the reader?).
One way to tell would be to look at which side is incited to violence more often.
It turns out, according to the FBI (which is a conservative organization historically and exclusively run by conservatives), right wing extremism and violence is in fact the biggest domestic terror threat in the US, and it's currently growing [1]. FBI Director Wray gave this testimony after a right wing domestic terror attack was carried out that aimed to topple the US government. Not much has changed since then [2]. Since the former President's indictment the other day, the right-wing violent rhetoric has also ratcheted up a notch, so we can expect right-wing violence to follow.
Notably, we can confidently say this doesn't happen on the left, as when Hillary lost they did not launch an assault against the Capitol as the right did. Instead, they knit pink hats and had a march.
(PS before anyone whattabouts the George Floyd protests, the FBI doesn't see them the same way [3])
I clicked downvote before reading the whole comment. At first I thought you were talking about the red team when you started with "mass riots and violence..." Then I read the rest of your comment and still felt just as good about my downvote. This isn't a constructive comment no matter what "side" you're on.
“Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed--and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment-- the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants"--but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.” JFK
Everybody remembers January 6 except those who want to pretend it didn't happen.
How many remember the floods of Twitter incitement to hit the gas in their F-150 trucks to run over protesters, and then how many people actually perpetrated vehicle attacks?
They don't have to, because he effectively can't be muted. People tweet quote him with an image, and it's not blocked even though I have him blocked as an account. This behavior is pervasive enough that you can still see his tweets all the time.
I imagine it's the largest metric in a mission control style room
it starts dropping, klaxons start blaring, the room drops to red only lighting, engineers on the floor start pulling out their hair knowing the shitstorm that's coming
Per original source, The code that was released today doesn't show the parts that actually alter the scores of Elon and other users. The part of the code referenced below just tracks Elon stats (from what I know). Employees removed most PII before the code was released.
Update: Elon was asked about these in a Twitter Space, he says it's not appropriate and will be removed from the codebase.
Additionally, from another Twitter engineer, the Democrat/Republican flags are apparently 10 years old and not important and do not have high feature importance.
Elons reply “I only learned about it now!”. What a crock of shit. We literally went through reporting a few months back where he was clearly instructing the team to make sure his tweets always come up, for everyone.
If I remember correctly, he noticed that his account with 100,000,000 plus followers was only getting 40,000 or so views. This lead to a Twitter engineer saying maybe his content wasn't interesting enough to get views and getting fired. And later on Musk said that they found a bug in the fanout system because his account was so big it basically broke things and they fixed it.
I remember everyone agreeing with the Twitter engineer who said maybe his content wasn't interesting enough, while to me that seemed odd. If people follow an account and they tweet and they're online they should have a high chance of seeing that tweet. That's the entire point of following someone. If someone I've followed tweets something I would like to see it.
The fanout bug was in weighting how blocks affect visibility and fanout.
Apparently it was an absolute and not a relative thing, so the huge amount of blocks musk has affected their visibility.
You don't, at least for me, I have 5700 followers and most posts (with art) only see 200-500 impressions, whereas a year ago I was getting 3000 on average. The Following tab is clearly (at least for me) not in timeline order, so most of my followers never even know I posted anything. Since I post art most of my followers are artists, so you would think they would see them. Impressions (which are Twitter putting tweets in a timeline so that people scroll by them) are not under the control of the poster. Likes per impression for me are up, so interaction is higher which is supposed to increase how often tweets are shown, but only timely retweets seem to help any.
I am trying to figure out how the algorithm decides on what to show in the Following tab, but the code is way too big to analyze without being able to run it and look at logging/metrics/stats.
Yeah but presumably he didn't think the devs would tag a specific metric for "elon", which would later be open-sourced. It's one of those things that makes more sense in retrospect...
As in: "My tweets are very important, if they don't show up on top, it means the algorithm can't recognize what is important, it needs to be fixed". And the team, who probably didn't see in which way Elon Musk's tweets could be that important besides the fact that he wrote them, they just decided to give Elon Musk's tweets a boost.
The most hilarious things to me was when I was reading some (unrelated to this drama tweet) posted in an article and the top recommendation was Musk's tweet that he doesn't artificially promote his tweets.
From what I understand of upthread, it doesn't "give elon musk's tweets a boost", rather any change which downgrades musk's visibility is considered a regression.
Obviously the end result is similarly that musk's visibility can never decrease, but it's a more technical (and to the letter) compliance with the specifications.
> We literally went through reporting a few months back where he was clearly instructing the team to make sure his tweets always come up, for everyone.
Feel free to give me a source for that, but I'm pretty sure that's not true.
It was widely reported in the days following the Super Bowl that he personally ordered his Tweets be boosted after a Tweet by Biden got more engagement than his similar Tweet [0].
As far as I can tell, he did not instruct Twitter employees to make his Tweets appear to all users, but he did want them to make his posts appear in timelines significantly more often. This lead to reports of users suddenly getting their timelines flooded with lots of his Tweets.
It seems like there was a rush within Twitter to raise Musk’s engagement numbers by altering the recommendation algorithm to specifically boost posts from his accounts. The special boost factor was later reduced, but allegedly still exists.
Wrong. Elon noticed his tweets had low engagement relative to his follower count compared to other accounts.
After some digging in the code base it turned out that there was a de-boosting factor based on the absolute numbers of blocks your account had, which affected popular and controversial accounts (like Elon’s) unfairly.
This investigation was initiated by Musk but it resulted in a great improvement in the algorithm with no special treatment for his account.
Well that's what the claim was. I never bought it, to me it sounded very much like the "Dear Leader Kim observed during the factory tour that one of the machines was miscalibrated and that productivity could be increased tenfold". Remember that he'd just fired an engineer on the spot for suggesting there wasn't a technical reason behind his lower engagement, and that the unspoken reason was he's frankly just a bit annoying and his epic meming CEO shtick was wearing thin. So I think when he raises the issue again, they just implement `author_is_elon` and they get to tell him that actually he is good at posting after all and there was just a weird technical issue they have now fixed.
Elon's happy, the engineers he turned to kept jobs and any time I find myself in the "For You" tab I see Elon's memes and his @catturd2 RTs.
> By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
> Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told.
It seems indisputable that Musk’s account gets special treatment, even if some of the changes may also boost other controversial users.
You did not reference any sources, while the article claims sources inside Twitter gave them this information.
Anonymous Twitter sources may have _low_ credibility, but Elon musk has _exactly zero_ credibility at this point. He has a significant and proven track record of making false and misleading statements, even ignoring the many many more difficult to prove allegations.
In my personal experience, software engineers, when you ask them about technical matters like "does the code do X" or "is there a condition for Y" are generally pretty honest. Programming is a task that requires being able to have structured and literal reasoning, and asking engineers about purely technical details usually triggers that response, even if you can imagine a social motive for lying.
Disagree, Elon has high credibility IMO, certainly higher than an anonymous source with incentives to slander. Not saying he is perfect but given the scrutiny he is under and how much he is “in the arena” pushing the envelope.
Elon is furthermore a software engineer (he wrote ALOT of code at zip2 & paypal) so your argument falls flat in that regard.
Credibility from what exactly? Having last year's most expensive mid-life crisis? He once had some credibility, no one will deny that. Respect is earned and lost.
I think him buying twitter was great. He is lightyears better than previous owners & management. He is also running two other companies doing extraordinary things in the world.
Of all the people you can hate on in the world, hating on Elon is to me very odd. Tall poppy syndrome I guess...
You're making it sound like this commenter has some nasty personal vendetta on Elon, when it's just that Elon's a goofy dude who keeps embarrassing himself in a very public way.
This isn't Tall Poppy syndrome. This is Sideshow Bob repeatedly walking into rakes and getting smacked in the face.
He makes way more mistakes than I would like as well. But he also has made a lot of fantastic decisions that IMO outweigh by magnitudes the annoying irreverence he displays.
By the way, I’m not excusing his behavior by saying this, but I’m pretty sure the irreverence is a complete response to the struggles and pain from non-stop attacks from fighting giants in the arena for years. Putting yourself out there, living in the arena, especially to the extent he has, is super hard. Most of us don’t have the courage. If you do, you’re welcome to enter it and try to be a better role model. The world needs it.
He tried to fire a disabled employee via a public tweet without speaking to them privately first, and then had to retract it. This is McDonalds McManager behavior, not CEO behavior.
Musk did not write a lot of code at PayPal, that's factually incorrect. And he was ousted and replaced at PayPal because he was trying to make technical decisions that would've killed the company.
Note that some of the "false" statements later turn out to be true. E.g. holding child a last heartbeat happens (ex-wife held him for death rattle, elon for last heartbeat)
While it was thrilling for a moment to imagine myself as a disgruntled former Twitter staff member, that is not the case and I have not been employed there.
My statement above was to read ’we’ as in as the tech community not ‘we’ Twitter staff; others have quoted some of the sources on this thread, but it was definitively reported by a few different outlets at the time.
I think the decade old comment related to a different part of the code regarding the number of followers you have in relation to the number of accounts you follow. (Everybody on the call wants to remove this: I wonder why they haven't yet.)
Chesterton's Fence. In a sufficiently large system, you should be hesitant to remove things unless you're sure you know why it was added, and all the things that have come to depend on it since.
I've definitely been hesitant to remove things I was pretty confident weren't used anymore, just because I didn't want to deal with the repercussions if I was wrong.
I didn’t know there was a name for this. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve definitely been bitten by this. You always have to weigh the chance you break something against the upside. If you’re actually fixing a bug, fine. But just refactoring to make something cleaner? Or deleting because it seems like it’s not doing anything, even after doing some research? Think again.
The author_is_elon flag doesn't surprise me, but the two political designators are somewhat shocking. I'd sure like to know what changes based on what Twitter knows about your political affiliation.
But on the topic of Democrats vs. Republican vs. independent; a big factor may be that "Democrat" and "Republican" are much more cohesive groups and therefore much easier to define. No one can honestly define "independent" except in a kind of "none of the above" sense, since they can range anywhere from extreme right, to the center, to the extreme left.
You might want to ask that of, say, astronomers, paleontologists, or even simply journalists.
Observing and measuring leads to understanding. As others here have noted, sometimes you want to measure to ensure that you're not inadvertently affecting an outcome or phenomenon.
> You might want to ask that of, say, astronomers, paleontologists, or even simply journalists.
You compare scientists with businesses. One of them's job and passion is to collect knowledge for the sake of knowledge. For the other one it would be cost without gain and eliminated if they didn't do anything with it!
No idea what journalists are doing in that list, what do they measure? If they want something measured they'd ask or look at other's services. Unless you mean the business that the journalists work for, but hen it's just that, a business.
I gave examples based on well-understood instances for which the reader is presumed to have the capacity to draw inferences to business-related concepts.
Businesses also rely on astronomy and geology, in instances. The former is used for navigation (though far less than in the past, I'll grant), and there are certain extractive sectors with interests in geology. Risk-management as well (insurance and catastrophic risk, whether from landslides, earthquakes, volcanos, tsunami, or other phenomena).
You'll also find businesses keeping tabs on weather, climate, competition (competitive intelligence), demographic data, politics, legal cases, laws, social and cultural movements, etc., etc., etc., which in many cases they have comparatively little capacity to change directly.
You're also jumping late into a thread which has already given numerous other rationales for why such activities might be undertaken.
Sometimes approaching a discussion from the PoV of seeing what you can learn from it rather than automatically adopting a presumptive stance of opposition or disagreement affords benefits. I recommend it strongly.
Depends what the metrics are used for. It doesn't make sense to apply artificial boosts to metrics that are only used for internal accounting. Well, maybe if you have an egotist CEO, but that wouldn't explain the rest of the boosts. We have to assume this code has some sort of effect somewhere.
This is what it means to let another country own your social media. Their ideas and memes unconsciously get preferential treatment. This is maybe not a good thing, but it is what it is.
It’s omission. They built for Americans because they were Americans. No one building this said “let’s ignore Canadian politics” or any other country, they just didn’t think about them at all, because like most Americans they don’t really care about the insidious Québécois plots to annex Prince Edward Island or whatever actual issues are happening in Canada.
The freedom convoy and it's repression with suspension of constitutional rights (because that's a thing over there?) and bank accounts arbitrarily frozen did get a little bit of attention in the American medias.
> the insidious Québécois plots to annex Prince Edward Island
I know it's a joke, but the people of Prince Edward Island would most likely welcome it. Economically that would be a huge boost. Not sure Québec would enjoy it however.
> The freedom convoy and it's repression with suspension of constitutional rights
This was needed because the convoy of morons was seriously damaging people's quality of life and the local police did not do their job. The police in other towns DID do their job and blocked the trucks. You should be mad at the cops who just sat by and watched the convoy of morons roll in with their thumbs up their butt.
Indeed their acts of terrorism were not reported by international media.
For example, during the occupation of residential areas of the capital they created deafening noise around the clock that was measured indoors (windows closed) at levels causing permanent hearing damage after minutes of exposure, with police doing nothing to stop them.
People can always use their countries' social media (and I assume many do!).
But it's indeed an interesting fact that people seem to specifically seek American tech and social media. And honestly, there's no shortages of foreign nationals commenting on American politics (and it's a good thing, it's their right thanks to the first amendment!).
The vast vast vast vast majority of people use “American” social network because they are the social networks that exist. The US is undeniably the main exporter of SaaS products. See: the incumbents freaking out that China is getting a turn in the front seat. I’ve never once heard of anyone seeking ‘American tech’, except for some punchline in an anti-Soviet joke or movie.
Foreign nationals can comment about American politics because the US doesn’t have jurisdiction over their speech, notwithstanding the back and forth over whether social media companies are liable for disseminating such content in the first place.
A material part of why the USA is seen as The Country in Western culture, and a noted big player in other cultures, is because of the power it projects via the media. That includes both Hollywood exports, and social media.
American social media companies have the benefit of a large homogenous deeply interconnected culture with a vast ad buying community. Simply put, a U.S. social media platform can get more revenue with less effort than a European counterpart (because they have to go country by country, language community by language community), and will generally outcompete those EU counterparts, with social network reinforcement effects doing the rest. This holds up for most ad-supported online services, which together with a much stronger private investment sector is the reason American platforms absolutely dominate Europe. The EU has a stronger government subsidy system for software but that system does not reward or expect market success, which is why it delivers very little value.
> I’ve never once heard of anyone seeking ‘American tech’, except for some punchline in an anti-Soviet joke or movie.
Really? Why is everyone using MacBooks and iPhones? Actually most Soviet computers were copies of western designs. [0]
> is because of the power it projects via the media. That includes both Hollywood exports, and social media.
The thing is, is takes to to project, someone has to export a product and someone else has to import it. Since people seek it and want to consume it it's easy to export.
> I’ve never once heard of anyone seeking ‘American tech’
One reason people have a distorted idea of what physical products the US produces, so I've read, is that most of them are products for industrial use, in factories and so on.
You look at consumer products that are made in..., because that's where the finishing touches are put on. That's not representative of the global economy though.
Before I deliberately locked myself out of it (well before Musk), I asked for my data.
They classify me as:
* speaks Indonesian
Interested in:
* Beer
* Cricket
* DJs
* Dance
* Enterprise software
* Horror
* NFL football
* South America
And aged either between 13-54 or (and?) over 65
Other than the age (I'm neither under 13 nor between 55-64), everything I've listed is incorrect.
On that basis, they'd probably call me a Republican.
Carries a different meaning when you're British, that name does.
What a strange age classification — no idea about what your age actually is, just that it definitely isn't 55-64. I assume it would never conclude you are under 13 for legal reasons.
But ever since Musk took over the amount of US political content has significantly increased in particular from the right despite me not living in the US.
It's hard to tell whether previously political content was weighted less and Musk has removed those controls or whether they are now weighted higher.
Some of the power users Musk reportedly had boosted are specifically right wing political posters, like catturd2. But then he's also boosted some high profile left leaning politicians, so it's not exclusive. It does mean you're more likely to see right wing American political content either way, which has to be annoying for people outside of the US.
I believe their point is that, because the US is generally regarded as 'to the right of' many countries in Europe, for example, a slight rightwing bias looks to us (I'm in the UK) like an extreme rightwing bias. Heck, even a completely neutral stance, as far as the US is concerned, will look like it veers to the right for us. Note that I'm not saying anything about how I believe the twitter algorithm should work, this is just my interpretation of what that commenter meant.
Europe is only a tiny fraction of the world, though.
Compared to India, Japan, Singapore and (depending on the metric) China, the US looks clearly left of center. Compared to most of the Middle East, the US looks extremely left-wing.
That extreme polarisation didn't start with the last few presidents; it's been the explicit strategy of the Republican Party to demonize the Democrats in every possible way ever since Newt Gingrich became a prominent figure in the 1980s.
It was frustrating to see Obama keep reaching across the aisle and basically getting spit on. Democrats have their faults, but Republicans have made it clear that it's impossible to reach any kind of compromise with them.
If these ‘distraction-causing arguments’ are affecting real people (read: foreigners, queer people, black people), then they’re worth paying attention to regardless.
Is your assertion that this is all some big conspiracy how you justify not caring?
No, it's that people have bought so heavily into just attacking 'the other' instead of trying to get along and being critical of policy and authority instead. The distraction is the direction to argue with each other rather than against policy/corruption/authority actually causing the suffering
some of those opinions are that others of certain sexual orientations are indeed subhuman and/or should be treated as much, and due to Popper's paradox of tolerance, we don't need to, and shouldn't, tolerate such intolerance
That's one interpretation, which I see used as justification to attack and be generally horrible to anyone who disagrees. I see a lot of commenters making comments that Republicans are some kind of lower intelligence being too (same the other way too). Are these people allowed to be offended?
Unfortunately the plight of LGB (and Womens' rights to an extent) has been utterly brushed aside by the continual addition of each letter to the cause and the arguments too hot and aggressive to separate out the underlying causes for fair debate on their own.
> Republicans are some kind of lower intelligence being too
You HAVE to be pretty stupid to fall for the really blatant propaganda the GOP uses. Remember that scary migrant convoy they invented just before an election to use to scare people into voting GOP and then it just vanished right after? Have you heard the incredibly stupid things Tucker Carlson, MGT, Matt Gaetz, and Boebert say? People like Carlson are way too smart to actually believe the crap they spew, they knowingly spend their lives telling lies to gullible and/or stupid people to manipulate them.
> Of course there is no left wing propoganda to fall for though, right?
I'm honestly not aware of similar propaganda on the left. By similar I meant an entire industry designed to lie and gaslight people into voting for people who will cause them direct economic harm. The GOP has made lying an entire industry and an art form. Now they are demonizing trans people in a way extremely similar to the way Nazis demonized Jews.
> Do you wonder how you came to form such blatant negative opinions of your political opposites
I know exactly why I have formed such a negative opinion of the GOP, because I've watched them lie blatantly and egregiously for the last 20 years and I'm really sick of it.
whataboutism doesn't really address any of the points in the post you're responding to, and certainly didn't answer the questions in that post which were posed to you
Because I don't disagree with those points. But the idea that there is nothing 'noticeable' from the left shows they're a) maybe better at it and/or b) saying things that are believed at face value because they align to beliefs.
For the other commenter to be so entirely blind to their side's propoganda should at least cause pause for reflection.
your supposition regarding a) and b) are pretty unconvincing, they're on the level of conspiracy theorists who say that a lack of evidence is just stronger evidence of the conspiracy
frankly your claims of equivalency are pretty unconvincing, too, but that's neither here nor there, since the topic is one specific side, not "both sides" or how you personally think they're equivalent
anyways, let's get back on topic to where we were before the whataboutism reared its ugly head (and we can both just pretend like you haven't been attacking the commenter themselves): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35397668
you say "attack and be generally horrible to anyone who disagrees", but recall that the thing said "attackers" are disagreeing with is equal or greater animosity towards people on the basis of their sexuality versus their opinions
in other words, it's a reaction to intolerance, specifically a decision not to tolerate intolerance - as we covered before, we don't need to, since doing so will end tolerance entirely (see Popper's paradox of tolerance for this)
I think Popper's paradox does nothing really but talk around an issue by changing the argument. Intolerance is not black and white, it is contextual. You can be intolerant of those who break the law, because they break the laws that hold society together (at a basic level). Paradoxes often aren't so problematic if you take them out of their own frame of reference (e.g. Zeno's paradox & Achilles).
I think the context we are referring to here is really free speech. Should we tolerate speech (opinions) that we despise or disagree with? Absolutely. And here we have the attackers responding to feeling insulted (framed as 'intolerance') by not being accepted/agreed with. Then they respond in kind and no progress is made.
You show me those people responding to equal/higher hostility and I guarantee I can show just as many examples of the opposite. And what I mean there is not "you're side is worse," I mean there are aggressive and horrible actors on both sides, who should not be the frame of reference for debate. But too often they are, and too often examples of hostility as used as an excuse for escalation or to avoid real debate.
It's nice that you personally think those things, but none of those things you personally think override or disprove Popper's paradox of tolerance, and thus none of those things you personally think will convince people to tolerate the intolerance that is, just as a single example, right-wing anti-trans intolerance
indeed, responding to, say, right-wing intolerance of trans people, by not tolerating it, is totally okay, despite your FUD, for reasons described by Popper
don't like your own intolerance of e.g. trans people, and actual attacks on them, to be responded to? maybe keep your intolerance and actual attacks to yourself, problem solved
This is an interesting point... they're making sure their A/B experiments don't adversely affect Republicans or Democrats. But lots of European countries are skewed more to the left and would broadly look more similar to the "Democrats" group.
Most big companies I've worked at are international and are regulated in many regimes, although sure the one with the main corporate headquarters is more important.
Or anti-statists! Not everyone who engages with politics is a bootlicker for authoritarianism but it sure feels like there’s no space made for this perspective (obviously)
Isn't it intrinsically self-reinforcing, if you have a winner takes all system? It's almost always better to join an existing team than start a new one.
It isn't an attitudinal problem, it is the logical outcome of our political systems. In political science it is known as Duverger's law: single ballot, winner take all systems inevitably tend toward a two party equilibrium.
Changing this requires states to adopt alternative systems, which can sometimes mean amending state constitutions. It isn't easy or straightforward, and the general sense is that there are better things to spend that effort on.
Parties come and go, but there will be two major parties. In fact under such as system if you're in one of those two big parties and you see a third party rising you need to figure out whether it's you or the other guys getting replaced, 'cos it won't stay a three party system for long.
For example in the UK, the Tories ("Conservative and Unionist Party") and Labour are currently the biggest parties, but a hundred years ago this was a novel situation, Labour were seen as a third party, while the Liberal party (which was eventually absorbed into what is today "Liberal Democrats") had seen success over decades and were often in government prior to that point.
A lot of it depends on whether your governing coalitions are formed before or after the election.
The US parties are just coalitions of disparate interests joining together until they (maybe) represent enough people to have a majority and be able to enact their collective interests.
I mean we're on the sixth "party system" in the US too, if that's your standard (it's a new "party system" when there's a significant realignment of which interests find themselves in which parties, either by a reshuffle among existing parties, or by new parties rising and old ones falling). Have you heard much about the Federalists or Whigs lately?
The voting demographics change frequently as well. California has voted to elect more republican presidents than it has democrat ones. It’s voted democrat in the previous 8 elections. In the 10 elections prior to that, 9 times it voted for republican candidates. Texas has also voted for more democrat presidential candidates than republican ones. People who think the US democracy is a rigid and highly predictable system simply have a recency bias.
It's just different order of operations on coalition building. Other systems divide into a majority and opposition at some point. In the US it just happens earlier, but there is the same diversity of opinions within those groups.
You'd think a country that played a central role in a global, decades-long unstable regime of bipolar power that routinely pushed mankind to the brink of nuclear oblivion would know better than to have a bipolar electoral system
have you never heard of the many times we almost came to setting off full scale nuclear warfare because of the bipolar power war of the ussr v usa et.al.?
the only thing that saved us was cooler heads that prevailed on both sides.
Why would throwing more actors with similar capabilities into the mix make the situation any more stable though? That seems like basically the old European Balance of Power, which broke out into open conflict more frequently.
This balance is the central theme of the seminal work in the field (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm52s). It may or may not be correct but is one of the most influential texts on the subject.
I take the view that the European balance of power probably broke out into open conflict often because of hidden alliances that made it hard for states to correctly gauge the costs of engaging in such conflict.
In the field International Relations, there's lots of discussion around the stability (or instability) of a bipolar distribution of power. Your stance is closer to neorealists, mine is maybe closer to classical realists. Have fun reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_(international_relati... and related links
But from a game theory perspective, having only two powers turns everything into a zero-sum game. I argue that leads to less cooperation and increased divisiveness. Not agreeing with Republicans means you must be a Democrat in their eyes. This "us versus them" mentality is somewhat tribal and leaves little room for nuance.
If I had a magic want, the US would have a 4 party system. Like a cartesian plane with civil liberalism <-> conservatism on one axis and economic liberalism <-> conservatism on the other axis
> Classical realist theorists, such as Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr, hold that multipolar systems are more stable than bipolar systems, as great powers can gain power through alliances and petty wars that do not directly challenge other powers; in bipolar systems, classical realists argue, this is not possible.
I suppose they must account for this somehow but isn't that exactly what a series of proxy wars in far-flung places between the United States and the Soviet Union were?
It's been almost 20 years since I studied any of that, but those proxy wars in far-flung places did directly challenge other powers because of the Domino theory
I don't necessarily agree with Morgenthau and Carr as I think most IR Theory is bullshit made up by academia... particularly the stuff around how players "gain power"
So I make my own argument which mostly hinges on the idea that two powers really means "my power" vs. "everyone else" which is not a recipe for peace
That's all nuclear incidents ever, not just US/USSR. US/USSR count from that page is more like 10 incidents across 40 years. Some of them occuring within days of others, they're that fine-grained.
In some other countries the different interest groups sort themselves into two factions after being elected but I don't know that it is really that different in practice.
It's not different, or rather it doesn't produce meaningfully different outcomes. I'm not aware of any parliamentary system with a wonderful diversity of thought and a long record of positive accomplishments. You end up with ruling coalitions which are typically pretty awful.
Ironically, America has one of the most open political systems. You register as one party or the other and vote in primaries. This has lead to a huge variety of people replacing hated mainstream politicians. That's way more than you can say for many other countries.
>it doesn't produce meaningfully different outcomes
It absolutely produces different outcomes than a two party system. Smaller parties make demands as a condition for joining any coalition (or similar arrangement). For example, Canada's NDP only agreed to back the Liberal Government on condition of state funded dental care for children being implemented. Now it is. Millions are affected. Whether you agree with it or not - that is unquestionably a "meaningfully different outcome". Other examples abound if you care to look.
>I'm not aware of any parliamentary system with a wonderful diversity of thought and a long record of positive accomplishments.
That's an impossibly high bar. The standard we're talking about is whether it's better than a two party system.
> It absolutely produces different outcomes than a two party system. Smaller parties make demands as a condition for joining any coalition (or similar arrangement). For example, Canada's NDP only agreed to back the Liberal Government on condition of state funded dental care for children being implemented. Now it is. Millions are affected. Whether you agree with it or not - that is unquestionably a "meaningfully different outcome". Other examples abound if you care to look.
You think logrolling doesn't happen in the American system? Parties are made up of factions who will entertain each other's preferred priorities, which is the exact same thing you're describing except that the parties of the various factions are nominally the same. There's no real natural or obvious philosophical reason why your position on gun ownership should imply a position on environmental regulation, religion, infrastructure buildings, racial politics, abortion, tax policy, and more. We're so used to the groupings that they seem natural but if we go back and looking at older American party systems you'll see parties that don't 100% map onto the contemporary ones, with a blend of some elements we would think of as fitting and others we wouldn't.
It's unquestionably a different dynamic. If the party is in power, then the party is in power. Period. They have less incentive to listen to smaller factions. Do they? I sure hope so. But it's not the same.
Furthermore, these internal deals are more likely to be kept private since theres no benefit to airing everything to the press, the public and the opposition.
In a multi-party system almost all those deals are public. Thus, voters can decide if everyone lived up to their promise.
Anecdotally, a recurring theme in conversations I've had while living abroad is the desire to prune or consolidate some parties.
While both sides in the US have big tents, they are effective in whipping votes when things need to get done.
It also helps that detracting coalition partners can't torpedo their leadership. Historically, factions within a party, like Blue dog dems or Tea partiers, had to wait for an election to litigate their grievances.
Well, yes, this was where I was going. The coalition is just formed before the election takes place. I live in a city with "nonpartisan" elections and I feel like it mostly just makes it difficult to understand what candidates in local elections even stand for.
In some ways it might be worse. Here we had a party that promised to vote with one faction and partly thanks to it survived the election. A few months later they did a 180 and voted the other faction into government. Opinions aside, imagine voting for Sanders only for him to elect Trump or the other way around. With that said, two party version also comes with major flaws.
Majority? Probably. Vast majority? No way. If that were true we'd not keep switching parties between presidents. And Florida, a mostly independent voter state, wouldn't have had DeSantis win in a landslide when he just barely tied last time around.
So many questions. How are users tagged D or R? Is that a manual process or automated somehow? What is the effect of these tags? Can I find out if my Twitter account is in one of those buckets?
you could probably algorithmically determine it in most cases based on any number of indicators from phrases used, to communities interacted with, which hashtages are included, which cohort retweets and likes most etc... thats not even getting into simply tagging political figures with the party they officially affiliate themselves with
Likely they are tracking performance verified politician accounts based on registered party affiliation. Why republican should count equal in the evaluation metric to democrat when nunerically there are less republican voters, let alone proportions on Twitter, is another question.
And how are they choosing to balance them, per capita, or just both sides should get 50%? It seems pretty clear they are making editorial decisions here. Does that break their section 230 protections?
I suspect that these are used for metrics tracking rather than being fed back into the recommendation engine. But there's no real way to know for sure given the limited release. These predicates aren't actually used anywhere in the code that's been made available.
Half the people that got promoted on my timeline were perpetually candidates for elections I couldn't vote in, and they _self-identified_ as Republican or Democrat in their own bios, or via the registration of their candidacy...
This is why I exclusively used to use Twitter in the "people I follow only" mode, and simply shut my account down when they pushed harder on the algorithm.
Why specifically track political parties? Where is author_is_american? Or author_is_mayonnaise_enjoyer?
Maybe it was a choice made many years ago that they thought was appropriate, but we can't yet know it's not used for other purposes. We can at least be reasonably sure they've added the author_is_elon within the past year. I would have thought there would be many more descriptors, or non-controversial descriptors.
Or maybe Elon specifically added those before releasing this code to get people riled up.
I don't believe echo chambers are nefarious - there's no hidden agenda involved with them. That's just how recommendation algorithms work, and it's what most people want.
But if someone finds some code that suppresses recommendations from a specific political ideology across the board, that would be nefarious, IMO.
They can be if they're involuntary and inescapable, but neither is the case for Twitter. It's designed around letting you curate your own feed, but it also constantly throws random stuff in through retweets and quote tweets - which is what people hate the most about the platform.
I don't believe repeating someone's comment nearly verbatim is as clever as you want it to be, nor do I believe recommendation algorithms are equivalent to the kinds of societal discrimination you allude to, nor would any reasonable person.
Instead of trying very hard to be clever, please next time try just as hard to make a valid point. I know it can be difficult when you think you smell karma in the water but do try.
Did you not get the memo? "If you're not with us, you're against us".
It's probably more of a conservative/liberal identifier based on US political party ideals... And they likely would filter any metrics from this by the users country
Well someone just asked about it in the live spaces[1] Elon is hosting and he said that should not be there. An engineer said afterwards it is just for metrics but then Elon chimed in again and said "we should get rid of it, it should be gone."
There are millions of lines of code existent. There are thousands added. Your prior for it being Elon's addition should be something like 10,000/1,000,000 or roughly 1/100. The prior that it wasn't Elon's change is going to be something like 99/100.
When you add the additional information that Elon wants the code removed, but existing Twitter engineers think it appropriate to keep this actually increases the probability of it being added by the existing Twitter engineers and decreases the probability it was added due to Elon.
Obviously, these are rough numbers, but hopefully seeing any numbers at all helps you to get an intuition for the math.
Why is lines of code the appropriate input here? Here's a different computation that is at least as plausible:
There are hundreds of millions of users. Let's say 300M. Only a single one is special-cased in this code: the narcisistic CEO who reportedly went ballistic when his engagement metrics went down. The prior that it's a change done in response to his demands is 299999999/300000000.
(But of course it was added by existing Twitter engineers. The odds of Musk being able to actually commit code to their repository are zero. Even if he had the permissions, the man simply does not have the technical acumen to make even a trivial change.)
I think you are right, my estimate is much much too low.
I'll explain my mistake and why I made it.
I think I thought to use the estimate I did because Elon claimed he didn't know. The prior probability of not knowing something in a code base with millions of lines is very high, but contingent on his involvement in the change the prior that he is aware of it is much higher. So I started the estimate attempt with the probability that I thought better predicted the production of evidence claiming he didn't know.
Your point does raise my estimate substantially, but I think it probably raises it less than you would expect. I don't agree with your 1/300M prior, because I'm aware that hot users get special treatment. I've seen Elon's account thrown around in interview-style questions about hot users before and used as an example of a hot account that needs special treatment. This is something I've witnessed, but it wasn't contingent on Twitter being acquired and it happened prior to Twitter being acquired.
I also don't particularly assign high odds to wanting it, based on the evidence that he claimed to not want it implicitly by wanting it removed. I don't think it seems appropriate to get to near certain probability the he wanted it with the evidence being that he stated that he didn't want it. In my view there isn't a compelling reason for him to lie about this. He owns Twitter, so if he wanted them to have his account monitored that would be a reasonable thing well within his authority. If he wanted it, he doesn't need to pretend to not want it in order to appease someone.
It does seem to me that the odds that the change was added in response to someone thinking he wanted it is much higher than 1%.
> I don't agree with your 1/300M prior, because I'm aware that hot users get special treatment.
That's absolutely fair, and 1/300M was a reductio ad absurdum rather than a serious proposal. Not all users are equal, just like not all lines of code are equal :)
I have a few issues with the "hot user" theory, but they all boil down to the same point: no matter what the use case, you'd never want to do this with a single static user.
Does your infra require special-casing for accounts with more than 100M followers? That should be a flag in the account properties that gets flipped manually or automatically: if these users cause infra problems, you really don't want to be making code changes + full rollouts whenever a new user becomes hot.
Is this just a guard-rail metric, to make sure there's not some bug specifically affecting hot users that tanks their engagement? You'd want a much larger static set than a single account just to ensure there's a large enough number/variety of tweets to compute metrics from. A single user might take a break for a week, or might only be posting very specific kind of content for an extended period of time.
In any case, even if you chose to do this with a single user rather than a set of users, why would Musk be the obvious single choice? He wasn't the most followed Twitter account until two days ago. A year ago there must have been at least a couple of dozen accounts roughly as notable as Musk. The odds of him having been chosen as the special case still would not be very high.
> In my view there isn't a compelling reason for him to lie about this.
The reason to lie about this is that it makes him appear weak, needy, and a target of even more mockery. Given the purchase of Twitter seems to have been a vanity project, having this be exposed and leaving it in goes directly against his apparent goal.
> The reason to lie about this is that it makes him appear weak, needy, and a target of even more mockery. Given the purchase of Twitter seems to have been a vanity project, having this be exposed and leaving it in goes directly against his apparent goal.
I think it only makes sense to think like you are if you've adopted equilibrium assumptions; if you haven't then I find this sort of reasoning to be a conjunction fallacy causing an epistemic closure.
JoshCole is doing a computation to arrive at the conclusion that there's a <1% chance that this code was added after Musk bought Twitter. I'm using the same methodology with at least equally plausible inputs to arrive at there being a >>99% chance of it.
How is that a nitpick? They're diametrically opposite results.
I'm JoshCole and I didn't find your reply to be a nitpick; you are right that the probability ought to be higher than 1%. My calculation was simplistic and I felt it was prudent to arrive at low probability, because I think probability of wanting something given claim of wanting it removed should probably not be anywhere near close to certain. My estimate isn't 1% though. It was just a short thing to share that gave an intuition for why it might be reasonable to assume he didn't know or want it.
In my opinion if you really care about this topic the right thing to do is ask someone at Twitter when the change was made. Getting more information would make us converge on the true estimate faster than arguing the odds IMO. Feel free to update me with the results if you do end up doing that so I can adjust my beliefs accordingly. I'm not going to try to gain this information, because I don't think the question matters much.
Of course he did because it makes him look bad and he's desperate for praise and attention.
What he wanted was everything that feature provides, without it ever being shown that it's there. But since he refuses to hire PR people and almost certainly came up with this idea in the last few days, no one was paid to hide its existence.
The next story out of Twitter will be the remaining engineers being threatened because Musk can't see his tweet statistics any more.
I read the code snippet before I saw the link and thought you were joking, but yeah, there really is an author_is_elon flag right there in the main branch.
Those aren't redundant or collinear though? Maybe you are surprised they didn't encode this as an integer "num_images"? It is fairly common to one hot encode ordinal variables with only a few common/possible values this way.
True, it still seems odd to encode an explicitly ordinal variable as categorical (particularly one with a small finite range, in contrast to the follower logarithmic bucket ones), but Twitter's layout is weird enough that it could be a impactful difference in terms of engagement.
This is (weirdly) common in production ML codebases written by software engineers. Like you, I have no idea why unless it's a memory optimisation (where you count 4+ as many).
Having every column as a boolean (0/1) means you can treat it as a bitmap. As an (entirely fictional) example, imagine if you wanted to get the features of a thread instead of a single tweet. You could do it as a union of all the tweets:
Ok that makes lots of sense from an engineering perspective. It's pretty insane from a statistical perspective though, which I think was the original point.
Per Zoe:
The code that was released today doesn't show the parts that actually alter the scores of Elon and other users. The part of the code referenced below just tracks Elon stats (from what I know). Employees removed most PII before the code was released.
Probably exactly the most boring, mundane way you would expect: they managed to contact the owner of what was probably a dead/inactive account and then paid them some money for it.
It's against the Twitter terms to pay money for accounts. I think more likely is that Twitter 'seized' the dead account and just granted it to her. I'm sure for instance someone had previously squatted on accounts like "VP" or "England"
Could be that those in charge of preparing this open sourced repository did it begrudgingly, and so they perceived the fact that it looked bad as a positive thing. "Hey, you wanted us to release the code. Happy now?"
Why are you assuming this knowledge is harmful to them? What do you think it means for their business?
No other social media platform will have this sort of accountability and public pressure to be better like having their recommendation algorithms public.
How hard would it be to replace this entire algorithm with the following pseudocode?
If !user.follows_author(author) then don't show tweet on timeline
Else if tweet.timestamp is later than all other tweets show tweet first
This is vastly superior to any other possible recommendation algorithm because users can choose what tweets they see/don't see by whom they follow and everybody has an equal chance to have their tweets seen by their followers. When Twitter moved away from this, it rendered my timeline useless so I started just pulling up people's profiles to read their tweets in order and eventually deleted my (pseudonymous) account that had several thousand followers. Almost nobody was seeing my tweets anyway thanks to this algorithm and deleting the account did not prevent me from browsing accounts I'm interested in.
All Elon needed to do to fix Twitter was to reverse all of the bad changes they've made since 2015 or so and restore the platform to what it was in the late 00s/early 10s.
If anybody is actually reading this thread, it looks like twitter is using "author_is_democrat" and "author_is_republican" to evaluate "Community Notes."
As with all of the media outlets that elevate these two private clubs into the arbiters of truth, votes for Community Notes have to be relatively balanced between the two parties. Bipartisanship is a trash metric for determining truth, but absolutely none of the people raging at Musk in this thread would disagree with it.
The “author_is_elon” flag may have been assigned to him because Elon’s Twitter account has the most followers on the platform.
So, for technical / performance reasons, changes to the algos might want to be benchmarked against this account in particular, because it’s the account most likely to be at the centre of capacity- / load-related issues.
private val DarkRequestAnnotation = "clnt/has_dark_request"
private val Democrats = "democrats"
private val Republicans = "republicans"
private val Elon = "elon"
private val Vits = "vits"
Wait, am I missing something here or author name is cleary mentioned as elon here while musk’s twitter id it @elonmusk? Why is everyone assuming this code is about elon?
I mean yeah it must be elon we know but what I was mostly curious about was if it’s actually meant for him only, why didn’t they use his twitter handle? And just elon? I am not a developer I must mention it looks like. And I was genuinely curious.
"author_is_elon" (notice the _ ) is a name the developer writing that code came up with for a category of twitter users. it has nothing to do with twitter handles. he could have chosen any name, but since that category includes only elon musk, he named it like that.
