> yeah these companies act like were all protecting the coca cola formula or building nukes or something. like really, its blocks of text being put in order

The Coca-Cola formula seems like a pretty good analogy, honestly. Most people can't tell the difference between different cola recipes, and there probably isn't anything in the recipe itself that's responsible for the company's success. Not as much as marketing, and simply being in the right place at the right time, anyway.

Are they trying to prevent people I.e. spammers from gaming the algorithm?

"A former Twitter employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters said the company has considered an “algorithm marketplace,” in which users can choose different ways to view their feeds. But efforts to offer more transparency have proved challenging, the person said, because of how tied Twitter’s algorithms are to other parts of the product. Opening it up could reveal trade secrets and invite abuse, the person said."

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/16/elon-mu....

especially on a platform like twitter :)

its almost like its a place where people can interact directly.

thanks for calling out scale and engineering problems btw! sometimes i think people think we're sitting around all day throwing darts at a wall of pictures of conservatives to pick who to ban next.