Dan LuuMar 31, 2023

The new stuff in the Twitter algorithm is wild.

"author_is_elon", "author_is_republican", "author_is_democrat", etc., are explicit terms that are special cased.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b928b479b512ec51ac2c3821f5922/home-mixer/server/src/main/scala/com/twitter/home_mixer/functional_component/decorator/HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala

the-algorithm/home-mixer/server/src/main/scala/com/twitter/home_mixer/functional_component/decorator/HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala at 7f90d0ca342b928b479b512ec51ac2c3821f5922 · twitter/the-algorithm

Source code for Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm - twitter/the-algorithm

GitHub
Show threadDan LuuMar 31, 2023
I'm a bit surprised at how many "well, actually, these are just metrics" replies I'm getting that seem to find the spirit of this comment plausible after (just for example), Elon asked why his engagement was dropping and then fired Twitter's most senior remaining engineer for telling him it's not a bug, which was followed by people seeing a lot more Elon in their feed and people also report seeing way more Republican stuff in their feed.
Show threadDan LuuMar 31, 2023

Like, how do you think ranking works? There are models/weights that determine a tweet's ranks that haven't been released and we know, e.g., Elon tweets, are now extremely highly weighted.

The NYT reported that Elon tweets have 1000x weight and the fatigue filter is disabled, but let's say their sources are wrong and there is no explicit special casing in ranking.

It's still the case that people report seeing way more Elon than before. How do you think this metrics data is being used?

Show threadf_ 🇵🇸
@danluu Someone opened a PR removing all that and it got merged. I'm just saying, I never used Twitter.
Apr 4, 2023 at 10:37amWeb