A word of warning when it comes to Vultr. While they are listed as a member of the "Bandwidth Alliance", they don't discount egress automatically. You need to request the discount from support.
Lately, I've been investigating 'serverless' databases (PlanetScale, Turso) that charge based on the number of rows read/scanned.
As a result, instead of just relying on the perceived performance of a query, I've started monitoring the number of rows scanned, which has emphasized the importance of indexes to me.
Granted, the cost per rows read is minuscule (PlanetScale charges $1 per billion!), but it's still something I keep in mind.
/**
* 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.
Infracost is OK. It's not great, it's OK. To not be meaningless, it's not always accurate, still has some bugs, doesn't cover everything. But it's still the best tool in its class and I use it.
If the value proposition of a cloud language included "infracost but better", I might be more inclined to listen.
I'm co-founder of Infracost, happy to chat more about how we can make it great :) feel free to join the community chat if you want to DM me: https://www.infracost.io/community-chat
[Wing team member here] We are looking into adding cost gauging and cost cutting abilities in Wing in the future. Right now we are focusing on the basics of the language.
You are welcome to join our GitHub repo and vote on the features that are important for you.
