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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Say what you will about Elon, but this wouldn't have happened without him. Thanks!

And thank you to everyone at Twitter who helped organize this release. Open sourcing something like this is no small effort.

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I am not sure about that. Twitter has open sourced a lot of stuff in the past. There were certainly people there who would run the site as a nonprofit public service if they had the choice.

Twitter contributed a lot to Map-Reduce, ETL and Scala communities: IMO they punched above thier weight.

Sadly, I think their best open-source contribution days are behind them with all the hardcore engineering they now have to do with fewer engineers.

Edit: I forgot about Bootstrap! That projects saved the world from millions of ugly web apps and dashboards built by clueless backend engineers.

On the other hand, I kinda loathe Bootstrap. I started web dev a bit after it peaked so maybe that's why but I'm so sick of the look and find it hard to think people ever thought it was good.

Another trend Twitter popularized that I can't wait to die: absurdly large border-radiuses

Twitter had 18 years to publish their algorithm under the previous management and they didn’t.

Twitter didn't get the algorithmic timeline until 2016. It also wasn't founded until 2006, so I don't know where your 18 years came from.

This release seems less immediately valuable than their other contributions, but historically more significant. It’s a pity we don’t have commits although that would be a huge privacy issue.

But yeah, while I would never work for Elon I’m glad he did this.

Well, they didn’t

But they haven't open sourced their recommendation engine in the past

I'd be nothing without Twitter. It's had more impact on my life than any other platform. I got lucky, but luck was only part of it.

Being able to DM people is incredible. It's the AOL Messenger of 2023. If it went offline, it'd be a terrible loss.

its literally led to the complete change of my future due to the ability to follow the interactions of successful people who are active on the platform. I've learned from them as if they were my direct mentors and made huge life decisions based on some of their talking points / motivational mindset. Without it, my life would've been a bubble in Virginia with my nearest network being 5 friends who love cranking out bottle on the weekends.

Politicans and companies all over the world are using it. Controlling that information space, is real power. And I am not yet clear, how much that release will bring needed transparency. As the algorithm in production, can have major tweaks.

The importance of Twitter was it being the primary posting location for a lot of things. A number of the artists and other creatives I know have gotten absolutely gutted by this.

Gutted about what exactly? Twitter is still there and pretty much works like before.

> pretty much works like before

... did you see the source code? Blue checkmarks are weighted 4x as much as non-checkmarks. That's just one example of a major change that wouldn't have happened were it not for Elon

Except when it doesn’t because somebody was so competent and fired more than half of the engineers.

By open sourcing the algorithm? Or what?

Judging by the many "issues" already, it might have been a bad idea to release on a friday, though.

This is 100% not their working copy.

Well yes, but I am pretty sure, elon envisoned warm welcome by the OS community and help for free and now that is off to a bad start.

I doubt he thought he'd get any help for free, given I don't think you can run this code there isn't a meaningful way to contribute.

It's just about transparency or PR, take your pick.

"given I don't think you can run this code there isn't a meaningful way to contribute."

Hm, there is lots of code released, I would think that some of it, can be run and might be forked and useful in other context, but mainly it is a PR move, sure.

He literally tweeted:

"No doubt, many embarrassing issues will be discovered, but we will fix them fast!"

People noticing stuff is free work but it’s still different than getting PRs and actual solutions like a real OSS project. And that’s fine, people are doing it because they care or like the attention or outrage and all the other personal/social motivations.

I'm not connecting the dots. Why is it bad to release on Friday?

Friday is traditionally end of the week and many people stressed out, tired, frustrated about the week and so on. So fridays the conversations are less nice online I noticed. So apparently many people used their friday frustration to blow off steam by spamming the github page with "issues" like, "rewrite everything in rust", "rewrite everything in scratch" ,... and while I was checking, many people were participating in this.

It’s not like they are going to release an emergency patch fix. This was a one way street.

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