> Machine learning enables Twitter to drive engagement, surface content most relevant to our users, and promote healthier conversations.
One that wants to manipulate your mind, one that echochambers your discovery, one that censors arbitrarily.
One that wants to manipulate your mind, one that echochambers your discovery, one that censors arbitrarily.
ML requires you know exactly what you want. And not what you need...
If you're not exact, disaster is imminent. Uber accident comes to mind.
Yes, rolling stones reference too.
After Google killed Reader I was forced to follow all the people who used to blog to keep up with their professional work. But especially in the last 3 years Twitter feeds have all come with a large side order of political hot takes that I have zero interest in sitting through.
To counteract this I have an extensive word blocklist and turn off retweets on many people so my Twitter can remain about the work of interesting people in my industry and not just an open sewer of politics.
Twitters insistence to show me posts that people I follow liked or engaged highly with bypasses all this.
I wrote an extension/user script to filter those - and retweets - out into their own lists on the front page [1], as I just want a chronological timeline of what people are saying now, which mustn't be "engaging" enough for Twitter's purposes.
[1] https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement#readme
Turns out it's not.
I agree that the problem exists, but its not just Twitter, and this is an unfortunate side-effect of recommendations in general: even if you do count-based recommendations, you are going to have a bit of echo chamber.
More importantly allow opt out and configuration of stuffing feeds with politics and liked by those I follow.
But the idea is not to empower users but masticate users to provide more 'value' to Advertisers by selling them 21stC version of 'hits' - the false & forced engagement metric.
This all stems from the mentality that Twitter are serving the money not the user.
It is short-termism.
Hopefully crap-stuffing users will allowing the resurgence of a diverse market that necessitates open standards unlike our current hyper monopolies and their data silos.
I dare say they’re acting well outside of their wheelhouse. Their job is to provide a platform for discussion, not whatever that mess of corpspeak I just read is.
What better way than program a robot to decide what 'healthy conversations' are.
Dorsey's capitulation to the complaint army over his recent chicken sandwich says it all.
I do see the hate mobs calming down ( or being ignored ), eventually, but when that happens we know Dorsey and a lot of these CEOs have little or no backbone.
That happened due to ML.
Not everyone is out there to use ML for nefarious purpose. And there are multiple use cases for ML.
Yes
>And it's significantly better lately?
It's gotten worse and a few youtubers I follow have simply disabled it in recent time (less than 1 month ago was the most recent one)
Normal conversation on youtube is barely possible since the algorithm randomly decides to not notify me of responses anymore or removes entire comments from my view that other people reference and I'm left wondering what is going on.
The only good thing about youtube comments is that I can remove them easily with a plugin.
It's also interface. I've been notified of replies to comments, click the notification, and I'm not taken to the reply. This happens to me on mobile enough that I've basically just given up trying to engage for most things on youtube.
- "Like if you're watching in June 2018?" [2k upvotes]
- "Most underrated artist of our time" [5k upvotes]
- "Wow, mad respect for <artist>" (written by verified account by other artist trying to promote their own content)
When people say these sorts of things are bad I think it's because their expectations and understanding of a comments section are wrong.
Of course, it's a question of taste what comments should be more visible. If the community actually prefers reading the same stuff over and over again, then the current state is probably justified, and it's just a moronic community.
e.g. "I got a chance to see these guys live in October, and [insert band member here] is actually a really cool guy. Talked to him afterwards and shared [so and so interaction]"
e.g. "This song was actually inspired by [such and such random factoid]"
e.g. "This song reminds me of my mom"
[video has 28 dislikes]
7 people are morons!!!
9 people are sad they have no taste in music111
What is wrong with the 13 downvotes?
WHHHHHHHHYYYYYY don't 16 people have any taste?
Well it's obvious that 18 people don't have any taste.
21 downvotes can suck it!
22 people are morons!!!
WTF, 24 downvotes? There should be negative downvotes!
25 people are morons!!!
Well I see Hitler and his 26 closest friends have seen this video!
27 people are morons!!!
28 people hate don't appreciate art!!1The comments got much better after Youtube added user ratings. Hardly "ML". I'm guessing they added ML later, but I haven't noticed any difference, to be honest...
And by "much better" I mean they went from amoeba level to early multi-cellular organism :)
Everything is just my opinion, of course, they're probably following a bunch of metrics I don't have access to and which could prove that the ML effort was worth it.
One that wants to manipulate your mind
Like your post here? Or my present reply to it? And so on...
one that echochambers your discovery
Which is good, because nobody has enough time in the day to process every conceivable byte of information they might stumble across...
one that censors arbitrarily
OK, because while everyone may have the right to speak freely, not all speech needs to be heard by everyone...
With Twitter, FB, and modern social media, they let their algorithm decide what I should see. They think they know what people want and ultimately what's best for me. I disagree with this so I opt-out of their services. Sadly. Because there are ( or were ) a lot of interesting and novel voices on there.
Also, I suppose at a certain point those 3XXX employees need to justify their existence.
And yes it's their prerogative to do whatever they want with their product. And yes I know private companies are not bound by the 1st Amendment.
If you're spectating, maybe. Completely falls apart when you try to engage in dialogue on Twitter, which is what both Twitter, Inc. and I want.
Say I follow someone because I like what they say. And I want to discuss what they're saying, or to explore existing discussions. I'm going into this ready to have a thoughtful debate or two.
So I open the replies, and they're what I consider to be garbage: flamewars, reaction GIFs, propaganda, straight-up bad-faith trolling, and worse. But maybe there's some good in here somewhere?
Assume I'm a typical human with emotions and stuff. Do I:
A) Immediately close the thread! It's not worth it, and I have the ability and willpower to bow out.
B) Scroll through the replies, muting and blocking people. Maybe if I do this enough I'll have a nicer experience on the next thread I open. Wow there sure are a lot of these folks!
C) Take the bait. Someone is wrong on the internet.
You know already, but I'll tell you anyway. I, typical human, tend to rush headlong into option C), which wastes my time, makes me unhappy, and gives me a negative perception of the quality of discussions on Twitter. Twitter, Inc. doesn't want that either, but they've picked these replies to show me. Clearly they don't know what kind of thing I think is garbage. So what can they do?
It's not easy.
And this all assumes you're trying to have conversation around someone with many many followers. If you're in a small circle, none of your argument applies.
Further posts by the original poster are at the top too.
Yes, you may have to filter through some posts on your own. If you plan on having a conversation with Obama, good luck. And for good reason.
But I don't want Twitter Inc filtering for me. Essentially upvoting and downvoting comments based on their algorithm. Sorry.
At least give users the choice to use their ML algorithm or not. I'd even pay to have it turned off or to tweak how I see my timeline.
So I don't follow.
Try being a woman or Jewish and have a conversation on Twitter about - say - gaming.
If the algorithms only ever selects things you already like, how would you discover things you might not know you like? Or change your mind about a subject because you only ever see tweets that agree with your worldview?
A good timeline would not only show you speech, ideas or content you agree to or like but also stuff you don't like and don't agree with.
> Like your post here? Or my present reply to it? And so on...
Except that Twitter thrives on controversy. There's controversy on HN as well, but escalations lead to flagging of content, not promotion of it.
>> one that echochambers your discovery
> Which is good, because nobody has enough time in the day to process every conceivable byte of information they might stumble across...
Strawman. This statement isn't about quantity, it's about content. Focusing on information that reinforces one's one view, instead of engaging in critical thought, is a dumbing-down.
>> one that censors arbitrarily
> OK, because while everyone may have the right to speak freely, not all speech needs to be heard by everyone...
Strawman. This isn't about what gets filtered, but who filters and how this information gets filtered.