Ah yes. Buying a company is totally subversive! /s

  • @Ferk@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    I’m not interested in Twitter (or any “individual-centric” social network to be honest… I don’t want to “follow” people, but ideas/topics). So I don’t have anything to lose from this.

    I might have something to gain if he actually open sources the algorithms Twitter uses, because if they are actually good (I have no idea), they could have other applications too.

    • Ephera
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      93 years ago

      Usually, these algorithms of big webpages are needlessly complex, because they need to be resilient to people trying to game the system. So, yeah, it may be good at what it does, but I doubt it would be terribly useful for e.g. Mastodon to adopt…

      • @Ferk@lemmy.ml
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        3 years ago

        Personally, I wouldn’t say that an algorithm that relies on obscurity (needless complexity being a form of obscurity) would be a good algorithm, not when it’s public. I guess we’ll see.

        It’s possible that the algorithms will have to be heavily refactored, cleaned up and maybe simplified before they are publicly released, since I expect that many of those approaches would be useless against someone with access to the code and the ability to run tests against it systematically to “game the system”.

        • Ephera
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          23 years ago

          Yeah, if you open-source an obscure algorithm, you lose the “security by obscurity”.

          Much like with encryption algorithms, you could push out the obscurity into parametrisation, but that only makes more transparent how the algorithm could work in theory.
          In practice, it will still be obscured, which is where Musk supposedly wants more transparency.

          So, yeah, either he doesn’t open-source it, the open-sourcing is useless for transparency or we’ll watch Twitter burning to the ground. 🙂

          • @Ferk@lemmy.ml
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            3 years ago

            There’s still the chance that they have/make an algorithm that can actually be transparent without being exploitable in ways that are detrimental (which is what I would consider a “good algorithm”)… but I agree that this is the least likely outcome.

            Still, I couldn’t care less about any of the other outcomes. I have nothing to lose whether Twitter burns or stays as it is 😁

            • Ephera
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              13 years ago

              Well, I’m of the opinion that creating such an algorithm isn’t possible, because it is fundamentally possible to game the system (by e.g. creating multiple accounts), and making transparent why a post is promoted also necessarily makes this transparent for anyone wanting to game the system.

              Having said that, it seems Musk wants to enforce that all users need to verify as a real, unique person. That would make it harder to game the system, and then they could use an algorithm akin to those for governmental elections.

              But yeah, then that algorithm again isn’t useful by itself.
              I also doubt the EU will be amused by his plans to nuke user privacy for no real reason.
              I’m not opposed to him burning down Twitter either, though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

              • @Ferk@lemmy.ml
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                3 years ago

                Hmm… that’s interesting actually. Having users have to authenticate might help some instances of trolling and abuse, but at the same time there’s the problem of the identification causing trouble for privacy.

                A middle ground would be allowing non-verified users to participate, but have them have a lower influence in the relevance of the content, perhaps having caps that limit how much non-verified influence can affect the weighted relevance of a post (so… content promoted by unverified accounts would be of a lower priority, and pushing it with a farm of non-verified bot accounts would not have much of an impact).

                Of course there’s likely gonna be some level of bias based on who are the people who would go through the trouble of verifying themselves… but that’s not the same thing as not being transparent. Bias is gonna be a problem that you cannot escape no matter what. If a social network is full of idiots the algorithm isn’t gonna magically make their conversations any less idiotic. So I think the algorithm could still be a good and useful thing to come out of this, even if the social network itself isn’t.

    • @wazowski@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      twitter isn’t and “individual-centrered” social network really: sure, it often can be, but it doesn’t have to

      there are also a lot of organisations, projects, networks, loose associations of whatever variety

      before my twitter account was banned the feed was even dare i say interesting 🤷‍♀️

      • @Ferk@lemmy.ml
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        3 years ago

        It’s definitelly not optimal for that. In my opinion, using proper blogs, websites and feeds is a much more intelligent, decentralized, and powerful alternative to artificially limited microblogging.

        The only reason companies and groups love having a Twitter is because it allows them to advertise themselves there, due to how big its userbase is. It also allows them to have a more direct engagement with their “followers” or appear to be more “down to earth” preciselly because of the way it’s traditionally a platform more “individual-centered”. Twitter just happens to be good for Marketing. And the same goes for Facebook.

        Imho, the blogosphere was in a very good place before Twitter and Facebook started to rise in popularity, when having a personal website was more of a common thing to do instead. Imho, the solution isn’t Mastodon either… I’d much rather go back to when using feed readers was a thing. I just wish there was a more modern pub-sub like alternative to RSS that we could use for websites (or maybe there is but nobody uses it…), and a more standardized API for viewing/posting coments to a blog post directly from your feed reader.