X is changing its algorithm to highlight smaller accounts | Hacker News Reader

X is changing its algorithm to highlight smaller accounts

techcrunch.com

42 pointsredbell60 comments

This is good. Was insane that it used to literally penalize your account if you interacted with sub 1000 accounts before.

Seeing how TikTok treats its creators really shows old Twitter management squandered something bigger by chasing only the desires of journalists and celebs on their platform.

Never seeing the bigger picture of what was possible.

Twitter was the first platform to get celebs posting on the daily so they had something new and exciting on their hands. TikTok then said, what if we turn normal people into celebrities?

TikTok would not exist without Twitter and I think Twitter could not have been TikTok. The two cater to different audiences. The elitism of Twitter is what kept the celebs posting there.

So wait…all this time it was actually useful to get a bunch of fake followers because the numbers alone amplified you?

I always assumed that fake followers were pointless since they wouldn’t ever actually see anything.

I missing being able to go viral on TikTok.

I understand why it happened https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Looking forward to see where X takes it. Recently it has been an echo chamber of big news events.

Just before Elon took over, I was able to see more teachers posting STEM projects.

I hope it gets back to that.

Real questions because I am dumb.

- What is a "creator"?

- Who are considered "creators"?

Most "creators" I see on insta/tiktok are just people with pretty faces or some random people trying to sell cheap stuff at a slightly higher price and constantly pushing videos(or reels for the cultural folks) promoting products, and of course the reel after their's is also an sponsored advert, so everything is now advert.

Only useful creators I see are some talented artists in Instagram, but sadly they are now flooded out by all new-age AI art generator /creators/ producing anime/manga/van-gogh arts of the same thing in slightly different context.

Creator is anyone who makes money by producing content. It's irrelevant whether you consider that content "worthy".

> Creator is anyone who makes money by producing content. It's irrelevant whether you consider that content "worthy".

Thanks for clarifying, this makes sense to me. Previously, I considered creators as someone making original content(could be informative, documentary, educational, news, art, music etc.), but I see that the term is now considered a much broader scope. May be am just stuck in stone-age.

The proliferation of corporate/business language is a hint - no one actually wants to "create content". They want to create art, music, writing etc. Advertising however usually needs something to ship it with, to draw attention, and so we have broad, hollow terms like "content" and "creator".

To me, a creator is someone who creates something. Anything. Everybody who is not merely consuming is a creator.

>no one actually wants to "create content"

Plenty of entertainers want to create "content" instead of what you label "art".

I think you'll find they want to entertain. "Content" is just the catch-all detached term for anything that can be consumed.

So what though?

AI art and social media appear to me to be the same thing. Automated propagation of styles or interests or products that lead to a homogenous landscape of essentially nothing.

They want to move Twitter from 4chan/LiveLeak/9gag style culture to TikTok/Insta like environment because pretty faces selling cheap stuff is more preferable(?), and doing so without a shutdown/relaunch. That was the direction even before the acquisition that never worked.

Last month they were trying to move it few inches towards direction of Reddit, but the culture didn't budge so they're recalculating plans. I bet it's going to help Bluesky a bit and that will be it.

Creators are people paid to shit in your head and maintain your attention that are acceptable because the platform considers their attention to be profitable.

The contract breaks if any conditions are not fulfilled or stop growing.

Mindhackers..

Mindshitters. Attention dynamics is about creating addiction.

Beehiveourall hacking

People who create content that causes thumbs to swipe towards them and eyeballs to swivel in their direction.

If I can serve ads on your stuff, you are a content creator.

The only Tiktok I see is what gets shared elsewhere, and that seems to be mostly people expanding on other people's music, which is pretty awesome.

Why did you ask the question and then go on to answer it using a sarcastic and borderline insulting description?

A creator is anyone who creates content. Differentiated from a consumer, who is someone who (mostly) consumes content.

I was never a really active twitter user. However - at least the people that I follow - mostly went to bluesky (and some switched to mastodon) and are a lot less active on twitter. My twitter feed is mostly full of people that I don't know and never followed. I am aware there is a "following"-tab. But that is mostly some political institutions and companies that I follow that still seem to post their press releases on twitter.

> As always, this will be made open source and undergo continuous improvement.

Wait - the recommender algorithms will be made open source? I find that hard to believe.

If you think about it, the secret sauce tends to be in the data they're able to capture and input into the recommendation algorithms rather than the recommendation algorithm itself.

I mean, even Tiktok has papers detailing their recommendation algorithm [1]. So does Youtube and plenty of others.

It's all in the data now a days.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663.pdf

It's been OSS for a while - https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

To be more precise, there is a snapshot of a subset of the algorithm available as AGPL at that address.

Hasn’t that already happened?

Kinda. Something got dumped with very few updates since the first month. The last few commits specifically mention open source which would indicate there's a private version somewhere with more changes.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

Whenever I see "X" I think of X11, so I misread the headline as "X[11] is changing its algorithm to highlight smaller accents", and thought it was about font rendering.

Let me know once they remove discovery features from the timeline, so I can actually see stuff from the people I am following.

Eh, too late I think.

I am probably a creator account, never could get critical mass on Twitter.

I can on pretty much every other website, just not twitter.

I know I should take responsibility for this, but given every other social media site worked great for me... I just never gained traction on twitter.

How is it too late? Sounds like an opportunity for you.

Maybe.

Maybe I'm jaded, but I just don't believe them. I think 'smaller creators' are probably just trying smaller scale tweets. I think they are going to disincentivize going offsite to my website or youtube.

I guess I'll try it, wouldn't hurt. But I'm def not holding my breath.

I really hope this brings doesn't turn out to be another "elon musk will be flooding your timeline even if you don't follow him or have ever interacted with his tweets" scenario. I wouldn't really want to start seeing people whom I have no interest in following in my timeline.

But also, I do value good recommendation algorithms, and they can definitely be helpful in improving the site. So it remains to be seen if this will be a good change or not.

> I wouldn't really want to start seeing people whom I have no interest in following in my timeline.

My city authority(police, mayor, emergency services etc.) posts latest affairs and developments live on Twitter, so I use Twitter solely for these news(I don't follow any friends in Twitter because I am not interested in their political views or silly retweets). What helps me most is that, when I see an account trending too much on my timeline, I simply mute that account and somehow it also seems to reduce the similar other accounts showing up in my timeline eventually.

I mean no harm to anyone of course, but I want to see the news of my city(because keeping track of 10 different news portal is tough compared to live tweets from the source) but when these important things get flooded by random people posting why Taylor Swift should adapt keto diet or whatever, I have to mute the accounts.

>I wouldn't really want to start seeing people whom I have no interest in following in my timeline.

Use the following pane. It’s linear non algorithmic

Even the smallest facist gets a voice now... yay?

"Smaller accounts" my arse. All that will do is give even more of a platform for the utterly fringe far right and most importantly the porn/scam bots.

It's funny, Elon Musk took over with the promise to get rid of said bots - but guess what, that didn't happen. Literally every thing I tweet these days, no matter if it's original posts or replies, gets insta-liked by at least one or two bots, with always the same homepage domains. I wonder what is going on at Twitter's anti-abuse department. A human would be able to instantly grasp the context of these domains and block them all...

I beg any journalist reading this to test creating new Twitter accounts. With each account, do not post or follow or like any content. With these "naked" fresh accounts, I have seen most (and virtually all) new account Twitter notifications pushing far right messaging like great replacement theories. These promoted tweets often do not even have more than a few dozen likes (so they shouldn't be notable).

Not to mention the obscene amounts of crypto scam bots and the bots under a lot of movie news accounts tweets advertising procedural t-shirts made from phrases popular from the movie in question. You always had bots but contrary to any of what he's said, Musk has absolutely made the problem infinitely worse

Scrolling through the replies to tweets of big accounts, Musk himself is the best example, feels like we are already in a SciFi dystopia. Nearly everything is scam or other weird GPT created nonsense.

> I wonder what is going on at Twitter's anti-abuse department.

Twitter laid off a large proportion of their workforce, so there might not be much of an anti-abuse department left.

If "Like bots" are the biggest problem, twitter is doing okay. Previously there were report bots, follow bots, etc. A lot of those are gone.

I get followed by a new fake account (~0 posts, thousands of follows, a dozen followers) every day. I haven't figured out what they are doing, but one guess is that someone is trying to hide their fake followers by making them fake followers of thousands of accounts.

If it just were the like bots... Twitter has a serious problem with spam and scams, I have provided more sources at [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38263468

Damn, all I'm getting is likebots.. I must not be in the cool kids club.

It’s actually a cost saving measure as they won’t have to pay top accounts as much.

Why would spreading out the payments save costs?

Two reasons:

1) Not all accounts get enough views to receive payments.

2) Not all accounts are subscribed to Twitter Blue. They can't receive payments.

Surely they'd allot and distribute a fixed percentage of their revenue among however many accounts are eligible, along some weighting scheme...?

Any other type of model would be unpredictable at best and more than likely an extreme business risk.

People get paid for posting on Twitter? That explains a lot.

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