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Comment by montag | Hacker News Reader

Elon is addressing this in the Twitter Space right now. "It definitely shouldn't be dividing people into Republican and Democrats; that makes no sense[...] you've identified something we should be getting rid of right away."

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Does it make sense to divide people into Elon and not Elon?

You mean owner and not owner? I think it's fair.

For what purpose? Do we know what this is used for?

Apparently it’s for analytics

In my hobby project where I have a secret admin page? Sure. In a (formerly) multi-million dollar prod application? Not really fair.

It's not that uncommon to filter analytics based on how much money a user has spent on the platform.

It certainly does to Elon.

Crazies vs the rest

To Elon, yes.

It's for content analytics, and I assume it's to make sure that changes to the platform can't be argued to bias one party over another.

Or one individual over the rest of the world?

Or even maybe to provide some background to various bits of lingo / acronyms people use.

I’m thinking along the lines of common word’s that have vastly different meanings depending on who’s saying it.

You mean like this algorithmic bias?

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...

So false equivalence is written into the platform. Insane opinions of one party must be displayed as often as moderate opinions of the other. It definitely works for angering everyone on Twitter, not so much for actual dialog or progress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

As if Elon has a clue what that feature is or is not being used for.

He didn’t say he knew what it did? It’s a good enough response to say that it shouldn’t be doing that period.

Generally, one should understand chesterton's fence before tearing it down

He was answering a question on the spot live on a video call. Careful consideration can come later by the devs who will investigate.

Must be nice to have people hold you to such high standards though. A sign of respect in a way. No matter how strenuous the takes.

Making commitments to things without understanding the basics isn’t something to be respected, it’s just dumb

The amount of stretches people make in these threads is amusing. There's enough real things to care about, don't need to set completely unrealistic standards you'd never impose on yourself or 99% of others you didn't already despise.

We should also not divide people into Elon and non-Elon.

Well, sounds like this pull request doesn't get merged. https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/pull/234

but how can we be sure it isn't doing that?! first, we would need to figure out a way to identify who-

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