Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Elon said in a recently interview that his new most important metric is to reduce regret time spent on site. An example he gave is that people should get push notifications about tweets they wouldn't regret clicking.

I don't know how twitter has me profiled, but these days it sends me onlyfans models, Matt Wallace, J.K. Rowling, Ed Krassenstein, Bitcoin influencers as recommended tweets to read.

Funny thing is, I don't follow anyone and nobody follows me, I just have a twitter account to occasionally (once a week?) read what Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and some musicians I like are tweeting about. I'm a liberal leaning centrist, I don't care about American politics much, or bitcoin, or onlyfans... I'm so curious how it decided to start serving me all this content that is so outside of who I am.

Also for those curious, this research is out of Berkeley and Cornell:

Smitha Milli, Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell Tech

Micah Carroll, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley

Sashrika Pandey, Undergraduate Researcher, University of California, Berkeley

Yike Wang, Undergraduate Researcher, University of California, Berkeley

Anca Dragan, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley

> "I don't know how twitter has me profiled, but these days it sends me onlyfans models, Matt Wallace, J.K. Rowling, Ed Krassenstein, Bitcoin influencers as recommended tweets to read."

Sounds like Musk has replaced the personalized recommendation algorithm with "Just recommend Elon's likes to everyone".

It's a joke, but I honestly wouldn't be too surprised if he did something like this. His fallacy as a product thinker is that he imagines everybody wants what he wants.

This works for Tesla which sells essentially a single product (the 3/Y are the same car while S/X sales are a blip). His product intuition for a car has been good. But his intuition for what people want out of Twitter is completely wrong because he doesn't seem to grasp that there are a hundred thousand different Twitters — each country and user group and subculture has their own idea of what it is and how they want to use it.

> I don't follow anyone and nobody follows me,

This is likely the problem. Social networks seem to put your account in a weird “starter” bucket if you don’t engage with it in the way it expects.

You’re probably getting pushed some weird version of the algorithm that some PM once devised when tasked with getting inactive users or new users engaging better.

So because they couldn't decide what to push on this account, they just spam notifications with random stuff? Seems at odds with the outlined goal of "reduce regret time spent on site".

At that stage, the only way to regret less is not to play the game. And "following nobody and not being followed" is one step away from not playing at all.

So Elon only does things he says when it is convenient for him? Figures.

The problem is, what's pushed is not nice pleasant content. It's content that is designed as the original article says, to amplify anger, animosity...

You get the blue checks if you're not following anybody. Same as if you expand any any popular tweet. From what I've seen these are typically angry and weird people

This is eerily similar to my (short-lived) experience on twitter- same usage (occasionally logging on to read Elon tweets and a few others), exactly the same sorts of recommendations.

Twitter just wasn't entertaining enough for me, if I'm in the mood for that sort of entertainment I'd rather read Hackernews or watch youtube.

That feed anecdotally looks similar to the accountless (not logged in) feed. Makes sense, "no follows" is pretty similiar to "no account".

BTW accountless twitter got better under Elon: it's now possible to just bookmark one's follows offsite, and poll their page every so often, without as aggressive login walls as under Jack. Also nitter.net seems to have survived the API armageddon quite nicely and is good for accountless twitter with even fewer distractions.

Just follow the people you're interested in, instead of hoping the algorithm reads your mind.

Seems like that they are throwing the whole political spectrum at you to see what sticks.

> these days it sends me onlyfans models

Multiple onlyfans, or Aella Girl? Because if it's specifically her accounts, the algorithm is probably thinking you're a tech nerd.

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