[paulbjensen]

The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful.

Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who those people were.

With that data, you could work out:

- What celebrities/influencers to use in marketing campaigns - Where to advertise, and on which tv/radio channels - What potential brands to collaborate with to expand your customer base - What tone of voice to use in your advertising - In some cases, we educated clients about who their actual customers were, better than they understood themselves.

One scenario, we built a social media feed based on the things that a group of customers following a well-known Deodorant brand in the UK would see.

When we presented that to the client, they said “Why are there so many women in bikinis in this feed?”

The brand had repositioned themselves to a male-grooming focussed target market, but had failed to realise that their existing customer base were the ones that had been looking at their TV adverts of women on beaches chasing a man who happened to spray their Deodorant on them. Their advertising from the past had been very effective.

That was the power of Twitter’s data, and it is an absolute shame that Twitter went the way that it did. Mark Zuckerberg once said that Twitter was like “watching a clown car driven into a gold mine”.

I’m pretty sure he must be delighted with how things have panned out since.

[BLKNSLVR]

That entire description sounds worthless to any positive direction of humanity. Therefore probably rapaciously profitable

Very sad face.

[mbs159]

Damn, this only validates the use of ad-blockers / sponsor-blockers even more

[rchaud]

In other words, using flash-in-the-pan data to build an advertising goldmine.

[johnisgood]

This reads very dystopian. You are not optimizing to understand people, you are optimizing to weaponize that understanding against them.

When you know what someone will buy based on exploiting their unconscious preferences, and you are paid to increase sales, you will do it. Especially if your competitors are doing it too.

And this happens at scale, invisibly. People never see the manipulation.

In any case, it is not useful for most people. It is useful for the people doing the deceiving.

[etchalon]

It's marketing. That's how marketing works.

[rhubarbtree]

And it’s far more important in capitalism than your products.

With the advent of AI, startups become solely about marketing, sales, and defensibility.

So most of the capitalist system will become of this nature. Doesn’t seem like such a good system, and inevitably unsustainable.

[caaqil]

The tech is interesting and useful, no need for the scary moral framing.

The original application of the entire field of data science or ML is/was actually based on this paradigm of finding "unconscious preferences" (your words) and hidden patterns. How one chooses to deploy the tech should be judged on its own.

On the current trajectory of tool/data abuse where Palantir et al. are leading the way, this is very low on the sinister scale.

[johnisgood]

I am not disputing that the tech is interesting. My point is about how it is being applied. The examples above are not about understanding people, they are about exploiting their latent preferences (before: "unconscious preference") for persuasion at scale.

Attempting to normalize that by saying "Palantir is worse" does not make it any less manipulative and sinister.

And to be more on topic, Twitter's value as dataset is overstated. Hardly the panacea people make it out to be.

[hananova]

To not frame the amorality and negative effects centrally and primarily is to be dishonest. There is absolutely not a single person whose wage doesn't rely on not seeing it, that doesn't see that that entire branch of tech has strictly negative value to society.

But of course, line must go up, and it's not you personally being negatively affected, so it doesn't matter.

[smcin]

That Zuckerberg quote was published in 2013 and supposedly was made a year or more before. Was it about when Dick Costolo was CEO (2010-2012)?

[gwern]

It's definitely very valuable, but for what AI model? How does any of that lead to AGI, or even just a good coding agent?

[applfanboysbgon]

It doesn't need to lead to AGI or a good coding agent. Some of the only people who are actually profitable in the LLM industry are the people making actual chatbots. There are several bootstrapped startups that run open-weight models with a $10 or $20 monthly sub and make millions in profit off of inference from people just talking to the things, usually for character roleplay / "AI boyfriend/girlfriend" stuff etc. Some of them even took those profits and invested it into training their own bespoke models from scratch, usually on the smaller side although finetunes/retrains of Llama 70b, GLM, and Deepseek 670b have also been done. Grok could probably be profitable if it targeted this space, as the most "intelligent" conversational/uncensored model.

This is already presupposing that profit even matters, though. Musk already burned some $50 billion dollars to control messaging on political discourse with his acquisition of Twitter. It was not about money, but power. After you already have infinite money, the only thing left to spend it on is acquiring more power, which is achieved through influencing politics. LLMs represent a potentially even better propaganda tool than social media platforms. They give you unprecedented access to people's thoughts that they would probably not share online otherwise, and they allow you to more subtly influence people with deeply-personalised narratives.

[KaiserPro]

> but for what AI model?

Sentiment analysis. Working out what words lead to what outcomes, and then being able to predict on new data is super useful.

For coding or "AGI" no, its not useful. For building a text based (possibly image based) recategorisation system top class.

[alex1138]

As an aside that quote from MZ does bother me. There's more to making a web-scale human rights respecting (because it has to, it's the internet, social media needs guidelines) than just making money (which Zuck doesn't seem to care much about anyway if he's sinking apparently billions into metaverse while having no account support)

Of course he would only see it through the lens of cash. I have no idea how profitable Twitter was under Dorsey but it felt the spirit of the company at first was relatively neutral, it was a tool, it was what Jack came up with

Zuck replaced people's email addresses[1], the feed has been wildly unchronological for years. Fix some of those problems wrt. lack of user respect and maybe you can make statements like "all else being equal, clown car goal mine". Or was it "dumb fucks"[2]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122

[Gud]

Ok, in that case I am glad that Elon fucked it up.

[cyanydeez]

It _was_ a great asset, however, just like models need proper data, as soon as musk removed the clamps on valuable social signals, well, he basically took a dump where he intended to eat.

[ohyoutravel]

They did say was, and did say Twitter, which existed in the past.