Adi RobertsonJan 3, 2023
I want to be generous but: what does “publish the algorithms” mean here? Release a subset of code about recommendations that hooks into a closed, proprietary social network in opaque ways? Open source all the code to Twitter, which (in addition to definitely not happening) tells you almost nothing about manual moderation decisions? https://www.alternet.org/open-source-it-twitter-algorithms/
'Open source it': Facebook whistleblower dares Elon Musk to 'publish the algorithms' controlling Twitter

On Sunday's edition of Meet the Press, former Facebook executive-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen said that if Twitter owner Elon Musk is truly interested in transparency and championing free speech that he should make public the algorithms that determine what users see on their timelines. Musk p

Alternet.org
Show threadAlex NobertJan 3, 2023

@thedextriarchy Twitter is really a collection of microservices, so it stands to reason that the code for the recommendation microservices could in theory be open sourced separately. Yes, these things tend to be highly specialised in the problems they solve and how they solve them, but some of the techniques used may still prove useful to third parties.

As to whether there's any real point to doing it, that's not my department.

Show threadAdi RobertsonJan 3, 2023
@nobert The potential techniques being things like, how Twitter does spam detection, etc.? Or more abstract technical stuff?
Show threadAlex NobertJan 3, 2023

@thedextriarchy Maybe both. Twitter has very smart engineers solving problems at scales that few other companies face. How they do certain things which may be easy at smaller scale might necessitate novel approaches at Twitter scale.

Of course that competitive advantage is a reason Twitter might not want to open source it. Companies do open source things that will benefit others, with the return being free community development (and second order effects like marketing to recruitable engineers)

Show threadAlex Nobert

@thedextriarchy Naturally, no one will open source their secret sauce. I don't know that Twitter considers their recommendation engine as a core differentiator, since as you point out it's not really a big part of The Twitter Experience (yet?), so maybe there's a chance.

And anyway, with Elon in charge, we can't rely on logic or good sense to dictate Twitter's decisions, so who knows.

Jan 3, 2023 at 5:06pmWeb