Twitter releases "The Algorithm"

links
1

A few things to note:

  1. It’s baked into the algorithm that Elmo’s tweets automatically get boosted. the-algorithm/HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala at main · twitter/the-algorithm · GitHub
  2. Immediately below that is where they automatically boost “Democrats” and “Republicans”. I’m not sure how they determine who belongs to which group.
  3. Elmo could have simply deleted the code that boosts his own tweets before releasing, but he didn’t. Is that radical transparency, or ineptitude? I’m not saying which I believe.
  4. This is obviously a dump and forget form of OSS. There’s no way to build this code and there’s no data (even mock data would be fine), so there’s no way to run it either. So, this is an interesting snapshot in time, but it will be useless in 6 months.
9 Likes
2
5 Likes
3

Don’t worry. It’s still there. The git history remembers all.

3 Likes
4

Do you think they have any developers left that know what a rebase is?

3 Likes
5

freebasing gets to be an expensive habit.

2 Likes
6

A rebase won’t help with all of those forks.

2 Likes
7

Twitter has become the costliest “burn it down for the insurance money” scheme ever,

2 Likes
8

True, but they have at least a bit of plausible deniability.

“Yeah, yeah, that was our April Fool’s version, here’s the real one”

That excuse doesn’t fly when it’s a regular commit.

2 Likes
9
2 Likes
10

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.