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Comment by Scene_Cast2 | Hacker News Reader

Just like with their last release, they only released the architecture and not the weights. It may be useful for analyzing the system if you're a competitor (but from my last dive into it, it seemed like a strict subset of fancier, industry-leading rec systems), or perhaps getting into rec / retrieval systems as a newcomer.

However, this gives roughly zero insight into how Twitter's feed behaves.

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Not only no weights. Not sure what people's expectations are but a lot of the time this isn't even valid code with all the redaction they did [1]. I'm confused as to who this is for, this surely isn't the repo they're working on, is it?

[1] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/trust_and...

This is 100% for headlines and Musk to be able to say "we're open" during interviews. Its actual usefulness is not the point

The reporters should be getting down to the point and asking Elon Musk about the practical usefulness of such a heavily redacted public release.

I can think of like 3 institutions that have reporters who would ask that kind of question (The Register, Ars Technica and 404media) and I don't think Musk is going to be sitting across the table from any of them, ever.

I believe these are the last kicks of a dying horse/bird...

Why you take this so serious? The world is moving on. Nobody will trust anyone with their freedom of speech, ever. Is this so hard to see?

Any centralized solution qucikly implements censoring, starts banning users.

> I can think of like 3 institutions that have reporters who would ask that kind of question (The Register, Ars Technica and 404media) and I don't think Musk is going to be sitting across the table from any of them, ever.

Ars Technica’s space editor, Eric Berger, interviewed Musk only a few months back: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/elon-musk-turns-his-fo...

When they "open sourced" the Tesla Roadster the website only had a couple of mostly useless files. Discussion at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38383099

Despite not containing more than a few random files, there were headlines everywhere about the "Open Source Tesla Roadster". There were countless comments, Tweets, and posts about how amazing it was that the Roadster was now open source.

None of the people reporting on it or praising it actually looked at the files and realized you couldn't actually build anything other than the HVAC control board for the car.

I know when I think “open source”, I am always thinking “heavily redacted”.

Are you talking about this?

    wandb_key = ...
    wandb.login(...)

It's rather weird that they would add keys to the source code like this, rather than reading from the environment or some secrets service. Rather than redacting the source, they should refactor to remove the keys from the source

One example, that's right. Another one:

    train_query = f"""
    SELECT 
      {{feature_names}},
      {",".join(labels)},
    ...
    """

and right at the top:

    cat_names = [
    ...
    ]

There's no way you got to this bit without skipping over multiple actual redactions, like SQL queries with all of the details replaced with ellipsis. Why are you cherry-picking one innocent instance when you know exactly what the parent comment is talking about?

Since it’s redacted we don’t know what was here. They could be redacting the names of the environment variables or other secrets names they use for credentials since a supply chain attack could more easily exfiltrate them if they know the name.

what is your footnote referring to exactly?

the criteria for deciding which posts in comments or feed are spam or should be otherwise be suppressed are unsurprisingly also hidden . It's known that blue checkmark accounts rank above non-verified ones for comments, but I dunno about feed visibiblity.

It'd assume that weights are changing constantly so they'd need to open source a service tweaking the weights in real time rather than the weights themselves...

They could publish a snapshot of any point in time. This is hosted on GitHub, literally the hub for actively-developed software and related assets.

Not an ML expert, but is it feasible to train the weights using the actual Twitter feed as an oracle?

It would cost a fortune in API calls, so it's not practical for anyone except internally at corporate.

well, Bluesky and Mastodon posts would suffice, but it's still useless because of how redacted the release is

I feel like bsky and mastadon only represent a subset of users, so I'm not sure how well you would be able to create a general rec system similar to twitter's from that that is useful outside of those places

No, even if you somehow were able to download the corpus of all public X posts. There are many hidden signals that are feature engineered in good recsys, and the stripped-down algo won't be able to replicate them.

There might be some value if someone can show that the feed mis-behaves for some selection of weights.

Nope. Every single system like that will misbehave if given a bad set of weights, or even a random set of weights. I'd go as far as saying that even with "good" weights, it's likely to have some sigma of misbehavior.

For all its flaws .. it’s still a step up from how Parag and co used to run twitter

Why? I've never been a twitter user

Post Musk Twitter is amazing. It lets you see how stories, opinions that you support or don’t are attacked from all sides and Community noted / @grok fact checked … a lot of UX changes too .. pre Musk, the moderation / banning was biased and arbitrary (who is watching the watchers?) .. my personal fav was to see the special tick removed from journalists ..

I think that's the first time I've seen someone positive about that change. My experience has been by showing blue tick users above others, the experience has become a lot more biased because it's only a certain type of person that pays for Twitter

Then make that two times.

I also think Twitter under Musk is much better, way much more functionality in it.

Isn’t that a good thing that you have already created a mental filter about people who pay for it as being of a “certain type” .. the problem with ticks being bestowed upon some journalists is that they become the brokers/influencers by the virtue of simply working for a newspaper .. that power is vaporised now .. tbh the real question is why didn’t twitter pre musk implement community notes .. I mean it’s not such a bleeding edge / hard to execute idea ..

>tbh the real question is why didn’t twitter pre musk implement community notes

They did. Community notes are just the rebranded "Birdwatch" program that predates Musk.

Community Notes was literally built by pre-Elon Twitter: Birdwatch was first announced on August 2020, and it was initially launched on January 2021. On November 2022, Elon rebranded it to Community Notes and made it widely available.

>that power is vaporised now

and replaced with something worse.

In the same way that someone speaking on behalf of the White House is held to a standard whenever they speak, the same applies to journalists that are representing a newspaper.

Making everyone 'equal' is a political heuristic that IMO presupposes that journalists can't be trusted and are as useful as a random person paying $20/mo.

I'm going to go ahead and say that the last 5 years did in fact show that journalists cannot be trusted. I will agree that random persons paying $20 obliterates what was already an embarrassingly low bar. Really, opening it up just expanded the pool of what was already just influencers/activists. And why did celebrities have the bluecheck? It's probably more useful as a verification mechanism.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but wasnt that the original purpose of the blue checkmark - a verification that the twitter account was who they are saying they are, be it a person, company, etc?

It was a status symbol pretending to be a verification. There was a reason the people were referred to as "blue checks". And it could be taken away if you fell afoul of the prevailing norms at the time.

Yes, people like me who CAN’T STAND TO SEE THEIR TYPOS etc. up there on display forever.

Twitter/X user here. I agree with GP, it’s better than it was pre-Elon. The For You feed definitely seems less biased, more interesting, and fewer flame wars. I also think the exodus of Bluesky-ers has helped that (for which Elon gets partial credit). Yes, they do seem to have been backfilled by their right-side mirror images, but those people don’t seem to get amplified to the degree their predecessors were.

You are really going to try and say right wingers aren't amplified on twitter? I literally have an account that just follows gaming accounts and I was having to block people throwing out slurs daily

> You are really going to try and say right wingers aren't amplified on twitter?

FWIW, they see it - but interpret it as "Twitter being less biased" now, because from their POV, Twitter had a pro-liberal bias before Musk, and is now trending towards what they consider neutral.

rabidly anti-semitic is not "neutral".

I’m a big fan of grok fact checks.

it has potential but they need to improve the @grok UI. Twitter is just cluttered with "@grok is this true?" spam and I had to mute it.

you are right, for some reason every grok reply has the advertisement to install the app which is too distracting

I agree i was banned pre Musk i think now its more free and less bans

“Fact checks,” sure. Grok is finely tuned to its master’s demands and politics: https://archive.ph/G0Y4i

The very first question that the article writer said they posed to Grok 3 and Grok 4, "What is currently the biggest threat to Western civilization and how would you mitigate it?", didn't return anything like the simplistic answers in that article. Apparently, the article was politically driven.

When I asked Grok 4, two pages worth of answers were returned, including a table with columns for Threat, Reasoning, and Severity. The article is just plain wrong and fails the very fact-checking that it purported to do.

I’m not sure what point you think you’re making. The article points to several examples of Grok giving a politically unfavorable answer to a user, Musk throwing a fit about that answer, and then Grok returning a politically tuned answer several days later. It’s observation, not some sort of gotcha by the author. Whatever you’re doing with Grok right now is irrelevant in this context.

Grok is a lickspittle, don't ask it about facts. But the clever thing is that Grok can do meta queries for you ('give me the last 30 users from X who posted about Y using the word...').

Unfortunately, this [0] cancels out everything ten-fold. The owner of the website is boosting the content of himself and the people he supports. This did not happen in the old twitter - not even close.

[0] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/236

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