This is a very cynical take. They should be commended for publishing recommendation code at all, which no other major social network does.

This is like FB open sourcing the compiled frontend code you can see yourself using inspect.

If we commend them for this we're helping promote and encourage this faux open source virtue signaling

No, that's very different.

Well if they say “we will open source the algorithm” and then what they really open source is a little bit of slightly relevant code that doesn’t allow us to understand the algorithm, then what we can deduce is that they are trying to weasel out of public commitments.

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.

Devil's advocate though: imagine you were to open source (probably with quite a short deadline) some 'algorithm' used in whatever you work on, but the rest should stay private; how would you go about that?

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.

If you were doing it in good faith, you wouldn't need to publish the actual code. Most likely you should publish an article and a flowchart explaining how the algorithm works. Publishing a partial chunk of code just creates a story that supporters who don't understand can parrot that "they opened their algorithm".

Exactly. Publishing what they have is the worst of both worlds - hopefully people will create flowcharts based off it, though, although it sounds like there will still be a low level of accuracy.

It depends on what your goal in open sourcing is. Are you looking to provide a base for others to build software on, and to provide a way for others to contribute back to your code? Then publishing the code makes sense.

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.

a large portion of HN users view anything elon musk does as nefarious, which is why half of these comments are negative.

Any time a billionaire buys a media company it's bad for the health of democracy.

Not necessarily. What if the media company was bad for the health of democracy, and the billionaire's incompetence destroys the company's social standing and thus its ability to do more damage (even in the billionaire's own interests)?

Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out. Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were dead?

(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.

This is basically at the level of "9/11 was an inside job to bring down WTC 1, but WTC2 was destroyed in an unrelated but simultaneous terrorist attack"

> Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out. Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were dead?

> (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.

Mastodon is way too flawed to be anything but a niche tool for tech people and activists. I highly highly doubt such a system can cross the chasm. That doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing though.

Or, he’s as incompetent as he looks.

i wasnt referring to him buying twitter, i was referring to him saying he was going to open source the recommendation engine and then doing it.

i agree billionaires owning media companies is huge problem

Which is why HN was so incensed about Bezos buying the Washington Post.

Do you believe billionaires can do good? Is their existence an existential threat to democracy?

We need more inequality. It’s a feature, not a bug. Entire swaths of people are convinced we need to flatten all people into one income bracket. That’s not going to end well. See USSR and Cambodian massacre.

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.

Yes. There are plenty of philanthropic billionaires. Yes. That much money buys a destabilizing amount of influence.

Billionaires are billionaires not by literally storing cash. The rest of the society values their contributions and creations in the companies/corporations they run. Sure, they have some liquidity but the entire concept of resentment towards billionaires is essentially equal to resentment for the betterment of the world. There are some exceptions but for the most part, in a well oiled market, you can't just become a billionaire by fucking over people. See Adani and how it turns out for him: https://www.ft.com/content/5c0b6174-e66d-4fa5-89a5-6da1d69ab...

Can you name one relevant media company owned by someone from the working class?

If you personally own a media company, you are by definition bourgeoisie. But see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cooperative#List_of_medi...

And when a highly scrutinised, highly visible billionaire buys it off a different bunch of billionaires which you know little about?

Every major media company is owned by a billionaire

Cynicism is the standard operating procedure on HN for anything that tilts against their party lines. It's completely illiberal.

Yeah it seems so. I think journalists have portrayed him way too negatively. For example, they mostly ignored the Twitter files, presumably because it didn't fit their political narrative.

It's because there was close to zero newsworthy information in them, just nonsense being disseminated by wannabe-journalists.

You clearly are oblivious as to what they contain

I encourage you to watch the C-SPAN recordings of the senate sessions where they brought in Twitter employees and journalists to cover what was in the Twitter files.

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.

The government requesting that the tos of a private company be upheld seems rather mild to me. Did we get the reasons for the requests in the released files? Were they trying to reduce foreign propaganda or public health misinformation or something else important?

You like your government trying to tell a private company what's true and untrue?

More than I like a private company telling me what's true and untrue.

matt taibbi is a wanna be journalist? lol

go back to your cave.

Please don't break the HN guidelines like this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

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...

"Way too negatively"? We're talking about one of the world's most influential people who uses their power to randomly accuse innocent normal people of being pedophiles. There is no portrayal too negative.

Because the way he acts gives people every right to. I agree that he may be misrepresented, but if he is, then he has to shoulder at least some of the blame.

The question is: are they right?

I still hear reverse-FUD about nvidia supposedly fully open-sourcing their Linux driver, when in reality they opened a tiny kernel portion of it that allows the main proprietary blob to connect to necessary kernel interfaces. You have to call out this bullshit when you see it.

Wait, what? AFAIU what you say is true, except for the part where the “main proprietary blob” does not run on the CPU. This isn’t as glorious as an actual open-source driver would be, but it does have meaningful advantages—e.g. you now have a ghost of a chance of implementing Nvidia GPU support on a non-Linux kernel, by uploading the GPU-side blob and rewriting the CPU-side shim as required. Or is the blob license-restricted from being used line that?

The "main proprietary blob" they're talking about is the userspace portion of the driver; the portion which does all of the heavy lifting. That definitely runs on your CPU. The only part they open-sourced is the kernel portion of the driver, which just exists to facilitate communication between the userspace driver and the hardware.

Hey, we can get even more cynical. Why should we trust that this code is even similar to what they run in production currently?

I can't imagine deliberately special casing Elon's account in something they made from scratch to fool people.

Let's have reasonable goals, shall we ? "Their shit doesn't stink as bad as others'" is nothing commendable, especially after souch publicity.

They should be commended for open sourcing something they don't understand because they fired all of the people whom understood it? Elon admitted as much.

I’d give them more credit if they’d been honest and kept it secret then lie to my face and pretend they didn’t?

I say "why not both". Even if they are doing it only for good PR, we encourage it by giving them praise, because we should encourage things we want. (While remembering that they are not our friend, they are an entity we should pressure, and the way we pressure is by giving praise when they do things we like, and critcisim when they do not).

If we are willing to not assume some borderline "it's what they want you to think" conspiracy play, obviously there was always going to be a lot of highly interested and qualified people taking a very close look at this and, at some point, there was always going to be very definitive conclusion of what's the deal with what they released.

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.

There is clearly a lot of information to share. It's worth considering this could be step 1 of n as opposed to assuming the worst possible intention.

It's healthy to have a normal amount of cynicism. They released it for a reason. "The goal of our open source endeavor is to provide full transparency to you, our users, about how our systems work."

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 love this take. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.

>It's healthy to have a normal amount of cynicism.

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.

I agree, which is why I wonder what your motivation is to defend Twitter. You're posting about this for a reason. If I were a social media company, I'd probably have paid agitators to defend them.