There might be some value in opening these algorithms up but, also, the moment you reveal how they work you will immediately start to see them gamified. Aspects of content recommendation/moderation will always be adversarial, and there are many good arguments in favour of some opacity in these types of systems.

I feel they're already being gamified, but by people with an inside line to Twitter, i.e. shareholders and advertisers. If you mean something like search engine optimization on Google by random people wanting to get their content on the front page, I believe there are ways to prevent or minimize that. Of course Google has just gone and pumped advertiser content to the top of search rankings...

> search engine optimization on Google ... there are ways to prevent or minimize that

If that was true, I'd imagine you could get quite a nice payday from Google.

HN's algorithm is open source, right?

That's not to say it's never been gamed, but it doesn't seem notably more "gamed" than Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Gamifying HN doesn't provide anywhere near the return that gamifying Twitter would.

It's also far more simple, no ML involved.

> And no, multiple posts in threads don't really work for that purpose because of the way those individual posts are distributed elsewhere, without context.

I'm reminded of Elon's tweet where he said a second stimulus would not be in the best interest of the people:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286673686821515266

People got PISSED...because they conveniently ignored the very next tweet where he said he supports UBI:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286675223434141697

Ok but Elon knows there's no chance of passing a UBI currently. That just sounds like an excuse to me so that he can oppose the legislation that is actually possible while claiming to support its "true form."

After seeing the disaster unleashed by COVID bucks are there still people seriously pushing for UBI?

What disaster?

Maybe they got pissed because it was still kind of a bad take? The imperfect stimulus you can actually achieve is indeed sometimes better than the UBI that isn't coming anytime soon.

Maybe people should try to be less pissed at bad takes. Everybody is wrong about something, and when you're dealing with a platform that exposes you to thousands of beliefs a day, you'll be constantly exposed to people who are wrong about something from your perspective. If you let somebody being wrong on the internet whip you up into a rage, I think that's a highway to unending Pain Town.

It was not a bad take, the stimulus packages have directly attributed to the massive inflation we have now, despite the Biden Administrations attempt to blame everything on Putin..

That's unfortunately true, though the the reduced productivity from the pandemic was another major factor. The increase in money supply provided by the stimulus, particularly the portion that went to economic segments with significant remaining marginal utility for the goods and services included in inflation measures (e.g. poor people that haven't been getting enough essentials) likely is a large driver of the initial inflationary pressure. The additional economic inefficiencies from the job-swapping and slow hiring coming out of the pandemic were also major factors.

I don't, however, think that one-time stimulus could maintain the current inflation, which is probably due more to the hiring difficulties and natural positive feedback loop that maintains inflationary economies.

Of course, if we hadn't diverted so much of the economic gains from the past decades to the wealthy and instead allowed a proportional increase across the economic strata, I expect the inflationary effect of the economic stimulus would have been far less muted (since there would have been much less pent up demand).