If we commend them for this we're helping promote and encourage this faux open source virtue signaling
I can’t say for sure if that happened, but if they made a clear promise and then did something else, it’s perfectly reasonable to call that out.
I don't think it's easy, there's inherently some interface(s!) where it's a hand-wavey 'get the thing from the private bit', and defining that sensibly is hard, and if you try to do it well will probably lead to a lot of meetings, scope creep, etc. - and as far as that goes it's not easy anyway, since it's highly technical and implementation-specific yet also a management/policy decision to make.
Are you looking to build public trust in you and your organization? Then dumping a bunch of code with no context isn't going to help much, as it's not code but behavior that builds or destroys trust.
Are you looking to lean into a polarized partisan environment, pushing a narrative where its you and your supporters against an unfair group of "others"? Then a big splashy move high on symbolism and low on substance that will inspire lots of high profile, divisive media coverage is a great way to go.
(Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform. And Twitter imploding without a designated archive will wipe out a tremendous amount of digital history.)
A lot of his decisions look pretty incompetent in the surface, like how could he not see how charging for verification devalue the system to whoever has the money?
Instead it could just be an intentional ploy to completely devalue Twitter disguised as incompetence. He can justify firing employees and charging for API access/verification as money-saving strategies, even if they're terrible strategies that have little chance of succeeding. And he could make enough people believe he's an idiot who makes things up as he goes rather than someone specifically driven or apathetic enough to run Twitter into the ground. Not to mention he was forced to buy them after changing his mind. Almost feels like a "so that's what happens" response.
I wonder how higher powers would be able to distinguish fake incompetence from real incompetence. Would they care how Twitter as a private company ends up if it's the case that it implodes from its own legitimately bad business decisions? It reminds me of how employers won't directly fire employees for discriminatory reasons, instead they make the employees' lives miserable so they're compelled to leave on their own, thus they escape scrutiny.
> (Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform.
If there's not an obvious successor, right when its shutdown, a lot of those people might get their habit broken and find something better to do. I know Mastodon was held up as a successor, but it's unclear to me if that's actually capable of scaling to that level.
i agree billionaires owning media companies is huge problem
That doesn’t mean we should propel poverty.
Midwits have been brainwashed into thinking “equity = good” with no critical thinking capability. The entire political college class screams “How can you be against equality!” followed by insinuations and fascism insults. The term “human rights” have been hijacked into socialism/communism propaganda.
It’s so deeply fucked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cooperative#List_of_medi...
From your comment it sounds like you’ve been consuming the 30s soundbytes from those hearings and the misinformation spreading around the internet.
A long list of 3 letter agencies were compiling lists of citizens and journalists and sending them to social media companies to review for ToS violations.
There is a very real threat to civil rights here. When this cannon swings around and points back at LGBTQ, racial equality, stopping the war on drugs, etc. this is going to be “not pretty.”
And the hearings covering them were unbelievably shameful. Senators talk passed the guests in the room. Refused to abandon their “sick burn” scripts regardless of where the conversation went. Insulted their guests. Went in random directions of questioning that had little to do with the root problem…
At the core of this, 3 letter agencies (seemingly across the board) have decided that it’s acceptable to ask social media companies to prevent citizens from communicating on their platforms by selectively directing the attention of their moderation teams towards individuals. Whether this is legal, or a violation of 1st amendment rights, is for sure an open question.
Only one senator directly addressed that and only briefly by saying “maybe they’re trying their best” - a statement that doesn’t exempt anyone involved from following the law.
If I were to sum up the hearings, I would like this:
Guest) Hey I think the government is breaking the law? R) Wow, I can’t believe it, look at covid! D) So Elon Musk gave these to you right? Are you even a journalist? Guest) Well they might be breaking the law R) They targeted conservatives! D) No they didn’t, this is biased Guest) But… they might be breaking the law R) COVID! D) Wait did we get these docs? They’re not in my sick burn list?
At the end of the day, they never addressed whether the government is allowed to censor citizens by weaponizing their ToS for selective enforcement and, if the government can do that, where is the line drawn? How specific are they required to be? Can a platform ban all political speech and then only selectively enforce requests from the government without doing their own moderation? How far can we launder the 1st amendment through a public-private collaboration of enforcing ToS?
Honestly I’m not sure what the hearings were really meant for, the government is unlikely to hold itself accountable. At this point I do believe the ball is in the citizen’s court to bring suit against the agencies named in the Twitter files like we did with the presidential surveillance program.
go back to your cave.
What's worse, if you have a true point, then posting like this actually discredits the truth and gives people a reason to reject it. That isn't in your interest and in fact hurts everyone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
If your play was "it's some source code, hence people will think we are open, and that should be really good for us", that would make you a very special kind of idiot in this space.
Why be transparent (or try to appear transparent)? To convince people to trust your platform (or to recruit - which seems to be another goal of the post). Why would Twitter want or need to do this now? Well, there is a bit of context. This disclosure doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I agree, which is why I wonder what your motivation is to take down Twitter. You're posting about this for a reason. If I were a rival social media company, I'd probably have paid agitators to sow doubt. Especially if I didn't want to open source my own algorithm.
this move could be seen as a strategic PR play to boost their public image amidst the growing concerns around algorithmic bias and lack of transparency. By inviting the community to collaborate and address these issues, they're not only shifting some of the responsibility onto the users but also deflecting potential criticism.
More credits would be given if the very idea of open sourcing the algorithm hasn't already been discussed to death with predictions of the difficult points and how it probably won't happen in any sane way.
I’m starting to think the broblem with Elon is mostly personal, he’s just a proxy and default wrong.
(not that I approve of his behaviors, but I can’t enjoy this whole mobbing that he’s getting; not that he cares this I’m not worried he’s getting traumatized in any way? it’s just how it’s become an identitarian trait for a certain group that irks me.)
From a quick clone and line-count, it has:
235 kLOC .scala
136 kLOC .java
22 kLOC .py
7 kLOC .rs
The Twitter files should be enough to create a desire for more investigation into collusion and manipulation of the population.
Find what is missing, explain why it’s important and report it back.
There is no other place like Twitter. Even here I get my comments deleted if I am a bit to direct against the climate religion.
Haven't gone through yet, but yeah, if that's the case, all this is, is a glorified framework to plug your own in.. Not exactly what was promised.
Fair point, I missed that when I skimmed OPs comment
Otherwise, if they are provided, someone in the thread will surely point to them.
there are contexts in which this may be well practiced.
> Context: I teach at Princeton and study social media and recommendation systems.
I'm not sure how this context was relevant. Your post was perfectly able to stand on its own feet and convince through content, not through authority. If anything, this "context" removed pondus from it by appealing to authority.
Ignoring the global nature of Twitter for a moment.
I am assuming that open sourcing the code aims to increase transparency about the business logic of the ranking decisions. At the same time you don't want spammers to be able to easily run experiments against a cloned version of your system.
And neither can spammers find and test the cracks and edge cases that would allow them to break the system, that does sound reasonable to me. If they were public there would be an arms race between spammers/those wishing to game the system and Twitter engineers.
From a quick skim of the repository, this is very limited transparency. The documentation gives a decent high-level overview of how Tweet recommendation works—no surprises—and the code tracks that roadmap. Those are meaningful positive steps. But the underlying policies and models are almost entirely missing (there are a couple valuable components in [1]). Without those, we can't evaluate the behavior and possible effects of "the algorithm."
[1] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml