A new era of transparency for Twitter | Hacker News Reader

A new era of transparency for Twitter

blog.twitter.com

100 pointssummarity48 comments

Reading this thread, I thought this press release was going to be interesting. Instead it seems totally anodyne and reasonable. Imagine being so angry that twitter is going to put its recommendation code on github.

Elon Musk clickbait broke the brain of half of HN readers. We need to consider permanently banning anything tangentially related to restore the quality here

Whether it qualifies as suitable for HN is another question, but I think the notable thing here is the anodyne and reasonable tone of the press release contrasted with the chaos and disingenuous touting of values of Twitter under Musk thus far.

Like if you saw someone casually building a snowman in their front yard you might be inclined to ask, “why are people talking about this? It’s boring. People build snowmen all the time” but behind them their house is burning down.

Isn't it slightly ironic for a post on transparency to be signed "Twitter" as its author instead of some human? Who's speaking at this point?

Of course in context of the rest of their missteps it's a tiny thing, but it stands out to me immediately when seeing the post at least.

Doesn't really bother me, not sure how useful it would be to include a name.

I think it's safe to assume at the very least who approved it.

I think it's fine. It represents the opinion of the corporation as a whole. The opposite of "the opinions here are my own and do not reflect blah blah blah".

It has no singular author.

This is so hilarious that I'm having trouble laughing at it. I can't even describe how funny this is. I love 2023. It's giving science fiction authors a hard time trying to keep up with the absurdity.

I genuinely can't tell if this comment is meant to be satirical, well done either way.

No, it's serious. "A new era of transparency by no human in particular". It's so blatantly self-contradicting that it's funny.

I don't know about science fiction authors, but I feel bad for parody sites like The Onion. I guess it all started with 2016 election - when reality is this absurd, how can outlets like The Onion make a living? Slapping at Oscar for a stupid joke, Congresswoman going on and on about public urination, Billionaire buying a social media company for tens of Billions, ex-president spending insane amount of time testing insulting nick names....

What a bizarre time to live in

No?

For me, at least, I don't even see it signed by "Twitter".

I see a "By" under the headline, with an empty space where the author should be. (Maybe it's since been updated/removed?)

Which is even more ironic/hilarious.

Twitter shows up next to "By" for me, but it took a few seconds to load in after the page itself. Maybe it's being blocked by a script/ad blocker in your end?

No, it actually has something to do with my Twitter account. If I log out (without changing any extensions), I see "Twitter" show up as the author.

The organization is speaking, which is made up of many people. This is fine.

Fine maybe, just not very transparent.

I have lots to gripe about with Twitter these days, but I don’t see anything non-transparent about a corporate release not being signed by a specific person. It is most likely a product of a group, not a specific person. Attaching a name to it doesn’t make it any more transparent. It just puts that person in the crosshairs given the current environment.

It was Mary from marketing

Its the organization. Whats so strange about this ? Think of it as "Twitter News".

Nothing twitter can do to restore the lost trust. Twitter has to die evenutally. I believe in federated microblogging future.

A closed secretive company must be better for sure.

I dont think the general public wants to do the work. centralized systems leverage that to win in the long run.

I dont think the general public wants to do the work. centralized systems leverage that to win in the long run.

Outside of hackernews, most people could care less. So many non-tech twitter users I have talked to, don't even know Musk bought it.

Why would they know/care to move, as you say.

For me the best social media company is one I don't have to trust in because I can look, check and verify. Or at least that others can do this.

In that sense, this does make a dent.

Still, without config/model weights, etc. it's not worth that much.

I think twitter can be replaced by another twitter. something that share some of the nice traits, but leaves out the others.

Whatever it is it won't be federated though.. except maybe as a small side feature "normies" dont know about.

Launching a big brand Twitter alternative on top of the existing Fediverse feels to me like it could work incredibly well right now.

The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.

Now imagine Tumblr ships ActivityPub. Every Tumblr user can now follow any Mastodon user, and vice-versa. The Tumblr ecosystem gets a whole bunch of new high quality available content. Mastodon enthusiasts can tell their skeptical friends "go sign up for a Tumblr account and follow me from that".

Or... if you're launching something new, why would you launch from a state of zero accounts when you could launch with Fediverse compatibility and have ~10m accounts that your first users can start following straight away?

> Or... if you're launching something new, why would you launch from a state of zero accounts when you could launch with Fediverse compatibility and have ~10m accounts that your first users can start following straight away?

I'd rather build something new and actually have a userbase than be something akin to a subreddit with fleeting users. It will be a lot more hard work, but it's worth it.

Also, Mastodon sucks. This whole "let's be free together" but also "don't step out of line" culture is disgusting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086.

> The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.

That's the problem. It's unnecessarily complex and other than a subniche, people in the real world are not interested in it. They just don't care about this at all.

Which is the opportunity. It's unnecessarily complex: so solve that.

It's possible that I'm missing something here, but I'm not sure what's the point of the 'fediverse' is. Looks like a solution looking for a problem, or an overcorrection to the trend from the 2010s to move everything to silos (independent forums -> facebook groups / subreddits / twitter).

Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?

>Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?

That's... kind of the point of the fediverse? A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible. Identity is controlled by the end user.

But the web is already descentralized, isn't it? What I mean is, why don't we go back to the early 2000s phase where there were popular forums for everything, each of them with disctint styles and idiosyncrasies. You could have a separate identity in each of them, and I don't remember ever once thinking "oh, it would be cool to be able to somehow connect this account with this other one in this other forum".

It brings me back a few years ago where everyone just had to use blockchains instead of... a database, when it made no sense. It should be decentralization in the sense of offer, not technical decentralization.

Mastodon and the like feel flat to me. Again, maybe I'm missing a key piece here.

> A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible

I don't think so. I don't think any of this will gather enough momentum to make a dent to the established networks (Twitter, FB, TikTok, Reddit, etc). That ship has sailed, imho

Sorry but I have this strong feeling that the Fediverse/ActivityPub will be one of those ideas that will fail miserably or just become a niche for weirdos. My reasoning is: it's completely unnecessary. Just have different sites, like forums from the early 2000s. Much cleaner and simpler. I don't need a shared identity throughout these places. It's not what the web was meant to be, at all.

On the other hand, I have no reason to assume Twitter will die. What trust are we talking about here? I have no idea. People will just continue using it. In fact, I vastly prefer what's happening now than what the last management was doing.

Not trying to be confrontational here. I'm trusting my gut feeling more because I've seen through so many things that range from delusions to failed ideas in the last decade: Theranos, WeWork, Metaverse, Clubhouse, Crypto [other than Bitcoin], Social networks pretending to be the arbiters of truth, etc. I have a strong BS detector.

Wait, did you find Twitter trustworthy before Elon bought it? If so, why?

Lol talk about tone deaf and rudderless. This is their era of impulsive decisions, cyber bullying and demise (I hope)

More popular related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391433

This is the first step… any thoughts on step 2? How many steps until advance notice for API changes?

Step 3 is profit.

It is kinda weird that Meta hasnt just copied Twitter while it is down on the mat. They could, they would…

They are too busy trying to get people to use the metaverse and dig deeper to get out of the absurd hole they have found themselves in. I imagine that the senior leadership probably hasn’t even noticed the sucking chest wound twitter has.

…they are [1]

[1]: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/startup/meta-mull...

“That doesn’t make any sense”

Transparency would be releasing the data that they check against for "abusive, toxicity, nsfw" content. I read the code, those are specific checks, but they're opaque on the data that it checks against. Without transparency on this data, they cannot prove to the public "twitter files" type censorship isn't still happening.

+ transparency would be realising the decisions behind the boosted accounts.

> By Twitter

so what is that, no one wants to put their name on this?

It is a feature, not a bug.

Was this written by an LLM? Kinda feels like it. But maybe that's just the nature of corporate copy...

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391433

No it’s not. Different articles.

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