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by throwayyy479087 1177 days ago
You gotta hand it to Elon - he actually did it.
6 comments

If you look at the GitHub repo, most of it is READMEs describing systems, not the models or code subleties which actually give explanations into how certain weird behaviors on Twitter happen. (e.g. the preference of certain users in the For You tab. EDIT: bad example, since there appears to be a flag for that in the code, although it does not specify which users are on the list)
The links in the README just go to other documents, but the repo seems to have most of the code for the components the documents are describing.
It seems to vary by service; some are more detailed than others.
LOL. My algorithm at twitter had been very simple-

See tweets from people I followed.

Don't see tweets from people I didn't follow.

Trust people I follow in their retweets to signal something interesting.

Unfollow unhelpful people.

Once that algorithm was rendered impossible, I left twitter.

Haven't missed it.

Having someone say- here's the way we are going to promote something to you- doesn't make me inclined to accept the promotion!

This still exists as the Following tab and viewing it is a persistent option. You don’t need to see the algorithm feed (“For You”) ever.
Roughly one in every four to five tweets in the “following” feed is a “promoted” tweet, at least on mobile.

20-25% noise isn’t a great ratio for something that I ostensibly curate.

"promoted" tweets are ads, just like you would see on almost any website you don’t pay for.
You should try Mastodon then!
Progressives have totally lost their minds.
So Elon is ISIL now?

Weird reply.

It's dril, don't take it too literally.
Do we "gotta hand it to Elon" for not missing one of his 40-50 self-imposed deadlines and feature announcements?
Given the previous leadership was secretly working with the feds to suppress political dissidents, ya, this is a good step.
Did he? Considering the vast majority of the algorithm is waved away as “ML model”.
I can't pretend to know if this contains the actual ML model code but there is a second repo the-algorithm-ml: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml
Where is the file containing accounts that are artificially boosted? We can guess what its single line is, but how is it incorporated into the algorithm?