This is a great thing.
You would need, at a minimum, a neutral third-party audit of Twitter's servers to conclude that the source code we see on GitHub is, in fact, the source code running Twitter. How often will they keep their GitHub repo in sync with their internal code, I wonder.
Presumably Twitter uses a version control system. But they scrubbed the history so that's also a point against their "transparency" claims. Without knowing the when and the why of changes you can't understand what you are looking at. People are pointing to that "author_is_elon" without knowing whether that was done before Elon bought Twitter or after.
But even then, git history can be faked.
> This is a great thing.
I disagree. It's the opposite. It provides the illusion of openness without the quality of openness, thus killing the debate once and for all.
There's no way to actually use this limited release to understand how or why any tweet is boosted, so we're in exactly the same boat we were in yesterday.
What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives? I don't understand the purpose of that approach. Help me.
This seems to be unsubstantiated. Are you really claiming that selective disclosure is always superior to complete lack of transparency?
Are you claiming total ignorance is superior to partial revelation? I think we would all do ourselves better to go live on a desert island and abandon everything about modern life. A shovel might be useful to bury our heads while we're there.
I am claiming that this is at least sometimes true, yes. Not always, but sometimes.
You're the one claiming that partial revelation is always, without exception, superior to total ignorance. That seems unlikely. Propoganda is often partial revelation, are you saying it is always better to receive only propoganda than to receive no information at all?
Propaganda can be a pretty vague term by the way. Can you describe how the public coming to a better understanding of the inner workings of the worlds most influential social media site is merely propaganda?
Of course, but this requires the propaganda be contextualized, which wasn't a part of the situation I was suggesting.
> Can you describe how the public coming to a better understanding of the inner workings of the worlds most influential social media site is merely propaganda?
You're begging the question.
Does Twitters disclosure of parts of the algorithm used (but certainly not all!) actually lead to a better understanding of the inner workings of Twitter? Or is such a release actually serving some purpose beyond transparency?
If we had that, I'd agree it would be good. But I'm not convinced we do.
Elon's done the exact same thing before at Twitter with his selective disclosure of material to friendly journalists in the "Twitter files". That, in my opinion, led to an overall worse understanding of Twitter's actions, not better.
>But I'm not convinced we do.
That would likely be because, as mentioned previously there is still more to come out; it's not possible to be reasonably convinced yet. Going back to the original question:
>>What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives?
> Assuming by default everyone but you is a naïve doe lost in a forest and therefore lacks the intellect to contextualize anything for themselves is undemocratic.
Luckily not a claim I'm making. It's better for conversation if you reply to what I say, not misrepresentations thereof.
> Going back to the original question:
And I replied to it already, but I'll reiterate: I don't believe this change "can only" be a net positive, what makes you believe that is the case?
There's nothing, that's what the point of this thread/argument is. The portion that Twitter has opened (or even simply committed to opening) is not remotely enough to hold them accountable.
The code they've released here is less helpful than a single Helm chart.
>>>What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives?
Because this is useless, and worse yet, it's pointless and blatant virtue signalling. I stood up in defense of Musk's private bid for Twitter, but there's nothing worth licking his boot over here. The suits don't care. The Open Source community gains nothing. The users will never see, interact with or modify the recommendation code. Nobody will be able to meaningfully audit anything until Musk stops selectively burning the books at Twitter HQ.
If Elon wants Twitter, he has the money to go get it. If he wants my respect, he's got to do an awful lot more than making "the algorithm" public. This release is so pathetic that it's probably colored my opinion of Musk more than any of the opinion rags I've seen yet.
Like if I tell you that your boyfriend has been having secret meetings with some woman you don't know, with full knowledge that the secret meetings are because she's a photographer and he's planning to propose, have I improved things by disclosing the information to you in that manner? Were my actions a "net positive"?
As long as they don’t try to tackle tweet quality at all separately from engagement twitter will remain unappealing to me.
We pretty much knew this is how all social media works, becuase a) engagement is what they want, why wouldn't they be optimizing for it, and b) how else might you measure 'quality'? Back when this started, I have no trouble believing some well-intentioned engineers thought that engagement was a good proxy for quality. A bunch of users give it the "like", isn't that a collective assessment of quality? Who is to say what quality is, overruling the users in aggregate?
I agree it has the negative effects you mention; and I've read lots of people writing about this, it's of course not a new observation.
But I agree it's good to have an explanation of what's going on, even when parts of are what we basically knew was happening on all social media networks. confirmed is better than "basically knew", for understanding how these things that effect our experiences (and our society) work.
Because selective disclosure is often propaganda. If a third party had chosen what the release or verified this is what's actually running in production, I would praise them.
Considering Elon's incessant lying, self-promotion, and manipulation, it's impossible to be complimentary of this at all. Everything he does is in bad faith.
So let's wait and see...
It's quite odd to attribute objective analysis to sycophancy. I intentionally didn't mention him but here you are bringing him up and fulfilling my point. Who is the sycophant?
But really, if people respond to Twitter's actions politically, that response exists within a context that was certainly influenced by Twitter's prior actions.
Sad to see.
If you want to compare HN to Discord, I would say that HN is like joining 500 Discord servers that together comprise the type of content discussed and posted about on HN, and every day checking each one's announcements channel, and skimming through general chats. But you still have the issue of being introduced to new topics, for example if you're interested in the AI trends then your selection of Discord servers that comprise what's posted on HN would be dramatically changing in the past few months.
If anyone knows then please tell me!
Besides, if you have to ask, it’s not for you.