[threeseed]

That lines up with reporting from Casey Newton a few days ago where a handful of VIPs e.g. Musk, LeBron James, AOC were being used as weather vanes to understand what the algorithm was doing.

It definitely isn't just metrics. Any algorithm change that negatively affected Musk was clearly not going live.

[db48x]

Do you think the code looked like that prior to Elon's purchase? I suspect that there was another name there before.

Separately, which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?

[threeseed]

> I suspect that there was another name there before

Who ? Musk is unique in being obsessed with being liked and relevant.

All of the other social CEOs including Porag and Jake have never really cared that much. And none of them participated in contributing content anything close to what Musk does.

[coldtea]

>Who ? Musk is unique in being obsessed with being liked and relevant.

This is a meta-level bias!

[mattl]

I miss Jake

[ajmurmann]

Do you mean Jacky Dorsy?

[hackerbee]

You mean Jack Dorsey?

[LightBug1]

How easily we forget our temp workers ...

[ajmurmann]

No, Marcy D'Arcy's cousin Jacky D'Orcy

[nailer]

Why is Musk obsessed with being liked? There was a hoax last month about the algorithm being tweaked to make everyone view Elon’s tweets which was provably false.

It is very much likely to be the CEO a company wanting to understand his companies product.

[debugnik]

> a hoax last month about the algorithm being tweaked to make everyone view Elon’s tweets

Didn't this just reveal that they're A/B testing on Musk's tweet performance? At the very least they're avoiding regressions, and I guess any incidental improvements to it won't be reversed, so isn't it fundamentally the same? Unless we're taking the word "everyone" literally, I guess.

[jrsj]

I don’t remember the specifics but I think there was a case where they accidentally amplified his tweets too much and they did reverse that change. He tweeted about it but I think it was a couple months back so it would take a bit to find.

[nailer]

Tabloid sites (Verge, Vice, etc) reported it as making Elon’s tweets appear in everyone’s timeline all based on the same blog article.

[tomberin]

not tabloids, not a hoax, did you go on Twitter during that period? I have him blocked and saw his tweets

[tomberin]

We can't comment on why, but there's no rational way to watch his behavior and assume he isn't obsessed with being liked. He constantly tweets about his own tweets performance, makes humiliating appearances on stages, and pretty much terrified that someone might do something 1/100000th as awful to him as he and his family have done to others.

he is isn't a CEO, he is a whining baby

[nailer]

> He constantly tweets about his own tweets performance, makes humiliating appearances on stages, and pretty much terrified that someone might do something 1/100000th as awful to him as he and his family have done to others.

Ah so he makes jokes, and is well known enough to need security precautions. This makes him “a whiny baby”. Solid argument.

[zpeti]

The guy is literally creating the next gen intercontinental ballistic missile system and military delivery for the US, but according to HN it’s whiny for him to need security. Right.

Oh and I forgot, he also helps ukranians vs the Russians. Not a good idea if you want a risk free life.

[Fuzzwah]

Hard to see the difference between that or someone so obsessed with twitter that he paid a huge premium to own it.

[api]

The alcoholic bought his favorite bar.

[scubbo]

I've enjoyed Matt Levine's metaphor in Money Stuff - an MMO-addict bought the maker of his favourite game.

[nailer]

Someone wants to measure their business after paying what was a reasonable figure when they offered it, but that became overpriced once the market changed.

Sounds like fairly rational behaviour.

HN isn’t a site for making unfounded personal attacks on others.

[status200]

His offer included a meme number and was overvalued even in April '22 (by 54% !), claimed he was going to combat the spam bots, and then tried to back out, citing the same spam bots. The event was described as a "hostile takeover" at the time [0], a term which has stuck all the way through to most summaries of the event [1]

[0] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/elon-musk-offering-to-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

[jdub]

It is very difficult to describe anything Elon has done to Twitter since (and including) buying it as "rational".

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I absolutely will criticize Elon for his behavior around the twitter buyout. He's handled layoff/firing decisions extremely poorly. He's alienated a large portion of the ad buyers. These are not unfounded attacks.

Elon does not need you going around personally trying to shut down other people's discussion. That's cult like behavior.

[threeseed]

a) Musk is a public figure therefore personal attacks are legal and normal.

b) Nothing I have said is untrue.

c) This is not a normal way of measuring the health of a business. Standard metrics include EBITDA, DAU, MAU, LTV, CAC etc.

d) This is not normal behaviour from a CEO. You don't see Mark Zuckerberg, Shou Zi Chew, Evan Spiegel etc using their products the same way Elon does.

[shanebellone]

He measured the business into halves; then lost one of those halves.

[freehorse]

That is "measuring their business" only if one of the main goals for their business is for it to promote them; because this is exactly what they measure here.

[nailer]

Or he saw something was wrong (which has now been publicly revealed to be true) and had the money to fix it

[jefftk]

> which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?

When you run an A/B test you randomly divide your users into groups, one (treatment) getting the new behavior and one (control) getting the current production behavior. So your question doesn't make much sense?

[db48x]

Depends on the question. If you want to answer a question like “does change X increase engagement?” then a straight A/B test works. But if you want to answer one like “does change X increase engagement while (favoring/not favoring) group 1 over group 2?”, then an A/B test plus measuring groups 1 and 2 will not work without a control group, because without controls you don’t know if any changes to engagement for your measured groups are significant. There is some threshold of change to the engagement for the measured groups which is too small to be significant, and you should ignore results that only measure that noise.

[underdown]

You’re describing a multivariate test. Two groups under two different algorithm variants. Multivariate tests still require control groups.

[slim]

I don't think so. If the token was "author_is_jake" for example, it would have changed to "author_is_ceo" on second pass

[tlholaday]

Our old friend Singleton looks up from the bench, hope in their eyes.

[db48x]

Possible, but clearly not the only possibility.

[winternett]

I think a lot of it is lies... I used to observe that tweeting anything remotely political went straight to trending timelines, so did tweets about crypto and NFTs...

I doubt that Twitter and most of these social platforms are driven by Ai... Maintaining and changing complex algos could not be done on a rapid pace like what occurs now... I think Twitter has moderators, and scripts that control everything, and it can be more easily adjusted to tweak what is visible on the platform based on whatever agenda they want to represent (politics, revenue, PR/damage control).

Twitter frequently bends the rules to serve celebrities, politics, and sponsors and for that they need to be able to quickly adjust scripts. True Ai is meant to function on it's own with minimal intervention, and therein a simple change to a massive logic scheme would completely FUBAR everything.

I think there are rooms full of people that filter and either promote or suppress posts on Twitter every day, namely suppressing any tweets critical of the platform and it's owner... I've noticed that at night time hours, moderation of Tweets is less restrictive as a cue to what goes on there.

There are certain topics that are not moderated as heavily as others (3d Design and other non-controversial topics), and some topics (for example music and porn) that are restricted heavily visibility-wise because they force people to run ads to rank in trending (because it generates a lot of opportunistic money for Twitter as a platform).

Users that are critical of the platform and Elon and his allies (for example) can easily be neutered by moderators and put on shadow ban for any period of time in order to preserve the illusion of calm concerning Twitter operations. Complaints about Twitter only become visible when the majority of the audience tweets about problems (as that can't be moderated out without exposing moderation).

It's pretty much all smoke and mirrors there in order to maintain order in my opinion, and it's pretty much futile and torturous to people who just want to create and seize opportunity for their business without spending tons of money on platform marketing...

[KarlKemp]

There is absolutely no reason to believe there was another Single user getting this treatment before. The Elon-case was just copy & pasted as an ego-stroking hack.

[philosopher1234]

i think he means trump, and i think it would've been strategically wise to give trump special treatment (tho probably not ideal)

[db48x]

Actually, my first thought was the previous owner, or perhaps Twitter itself. But I left the question open, since it doesn’t matter who.

[mynameisvlad]

Considering I had to look up who the Twitter CEO even was before Musk, I’m going to say that no, they didn’t do the same thing to themselves.

[db48x]

Your memory of who the previous CEO was is not evidence one way or the other.

[KyeRussell]

No. Not a chance. Elon’s claims of mismanagement at Twitter have merit, though not nearly as much as he think, but the one thing that’s undeniable is that the previous “owner” (well, the CEO), is an adult that didn’t care about this shit.

[dudeinjapan]

Isn't it a problem if the CEO of Twitter doesn't care about his/her tweets, and the general public doesn't care either?