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Comment by twtrgrunt | Hacker News Reader

still speculation without being an employee (even if it did some research from blogs which seems to be more then most do) twitter should just write their own post and shut everyone up already. idk why the company is so secretive about everything. its clearly not doing them any favors

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I'd love for twitter to take a more active role in this, but from what I understand, twitter employees are forced to be pretty tight-lipped about these things.

I tried to reference as many of the official sources as possible (in addition to drawing on my past experienced at Amazon + Facebook).

yeah these companies act like were all protecting the coca cola formula or building nukes or something. like really, its blocks of text being put in order. the hr, pr, comms, leaders or w/e seem so disconnected. im sure there is some bs reason like were protecting the company, i think its misguided being so closed off though and missing the bigger picture of building trust with users.

especially on a platform like twitter :)

its almost like its a place where people can interact directly.

thanks for calling out scale and engineering problems btw! sometimes i think people think we're sitting around all day throwing darts at a wall of pictures of conservatives to pick who to ban next.

> yeah these companies act like were all protecting the coca cola formula or building nukes or something. like really, its blocks of text being put in order

The Coca-Cola formula seems like a pretty good analogy, honestly. Most people can't tell the difference between different cola recipes, and there probably isn't anything in the recipe itself that's responsible for the company's success. Not as much as marketing, and simply being in the right place at the right time, anyway.

Are they trying to prevent people I.e. spammers from gaming the algorithm?

"A former Twitter employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters said the company has considered an “algorithm marketplace,” in which users can choose different ways to view their feeds. But efforts to offer more transparency have proved challenging, the person said, because of how tied Twitter’s algorithms are to other parts of the product. Opening it up could reveal trade secrets and invite abuse, the person said."

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/16/elon-mu....

Twitter, in general, is a remarkably open company internally. Because it leaks things like a sieve and has people dig into its products for new stuff, this ends up being the case externally as well. Most major A/B tests are announced via the various official Twitter accounts, for example, and employees regularly tweet about or solicit feedback about new features. Editing tweets, for example, had a concerted effort to avoid it from leaking externally (specifically compiled out of builds rather than being behind a feature flag, codenames, documents mostly put behind “do not distribute internally”) and it was still a somewhat open secret, since you could stumble upon it in the codebase or when searching for bugs. Companies that “care” take far more extreme steps to hide things than Twitter does, or I would argue even knows how to do. It’s not in their DNA.

With that said, the timeline is somewhat secret sauce but mostly it’s just a glop of various parameters that aren’t very interesting to share. Like, how are you going to even describe it to someone? It’s easy to talk about changing a button color, but “we promote retweets 10% more now” is boring and not really something that most people care about.

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