i'm too busy to pay a lot of attention to all of this, but like most peeps i am curious
so take what i say with a hobo sized dollop of st. swithin's bum salve
that said, in my opinion, no (and that's a relative no)
musk is a playing a very long game and if i'm looking at his actions i see that he put up a poll/survey asking to make the code (or part of it public)
results, over 80% wanted to see the code (so he said ok , you'll get it)
he had promised to make the it available in feb, but pushed that to the end of march, so there it is
and if we think back musk has stated on more than one occasion that tesla is a software company
regards
btw, i searched the credit, couldn't find parker
and siskind in the high priestx of the temple of the " i hate elon musk and hope he goes broke and dies penniless in an old van down by the river fan club"
see her old twits and fb posts
I read that Elon Musk may have to bail out Twitter with his own personal savings.
Probably not true but if so, Twitter will have proved to be a very expensive vanity investment.
So far, I observe considerable self-promotion on Twitter but not much with the potential to 'save democracy'. I do learn things on Twitter and there can be considerable entertainment value but am not convinced it is a cost-effective way of using one's time unless self-promoting.
Super interesting code breakdown for the dumpster fire that is Twitter:
Elon Musk released the Twitter feed algorithm on Git yesterday as open-source. I know how to read code and know Git, so I had a brief looksy.
First of all, holy hell, I can't believe he let this algorithm see the light of day. It reveals some INSANE biases which are the REAL "Twitter Files", if anyone besides engineers gets interested. My only thought as to why he publicized the code is that Twitter is a wreck and he fired most of his engineering team, the remainder of whom now can't keep up, so he's hoping that by open-sourcing the code, engineers like me will fix it for free. And indeed, you can make pull requests on his repository if you have a Git account (and I do.) I'm not about to help.
(For laymen, a pull request is when you pull the code to your local machine, alter it, and then make a request that your changes get integrated into the repository, which the owner of the repository must approve.) I use Git for version control. Meaning every change is documented and approved. Undoubtedly, Musk will task a remaining engineer with reviewing these Git pushes, and potentially approving them.
Remember when people started complaining that all they saw were tweets from Elon Musk, even though they didn't follow him? Or all they see are right-wing lunatics, even though they didn't choose to see that? There's a literal carve-out in the code to artificially boost Musk and right-wing lunatics. Narcissist much? The code also arbitrarily dumps you into "categories" like Democrat, Republican, Power User, etc. He's also artificially restricting tweets about The Ukraine and bolstering Russia. I wonder who's paying him! Not a mystery.
Every interaction with your tweets gets ranked. Every like is worth a lot. Replies and retweets are worth less. This is opposite of normal (I used to write algorithms for search engines), where a like is passive interaction, retweets and comments are active interaction, which should be weighted more heavily. Negative interactions are also weighted. If you've been blocked or reported, you're punished for that. Your tweets get seen less.
The most insane part of the algorithm (in my opinion) is that if you follow a lot more people than follow you, you get artificially suppressed as "unimportant." That means someone like you or me doesn't get seen. I follow around three times as many people as follow me, which means I effectively do not exist on Twitter. This means that bad actors and bots (who follow nobody, because they aren't human, get artificially amplified.)
Including a video or an image in your tweet artificially boosts you. Including a link to an external website (like a news site) hurts you. Misinformation gets downgraded for normal people. Blue checks boost you insanely. This effectively results in blue-checked people being able to spread misinformation with impunity. As you know, now anybody can pay Elon $8 for that sweet sweet blue checkmark, including bots and foreign actors.
Y'all. Twitter is a DISASTER. If you've used it since Musk took over, you at least suspected it. Musk is a foreign actor and at best, a narcissist. At worst, he's deliberately bolstering the right-wing looniverse (as evidenced by my personal observations, and now confirmed by inspection of his algorithm.)
All of this is not to say, drop Twitter, or to espouse an opinion of what you should do. I'm going to hang out and see what happens. I'm just telling you, as a person who writes these kinds of algorithms professionaly, what the code Elon Musk provided publicly, indicates.
Super interesting code breakdown for the dumpster fire that is Twitter:
Elon Musk released the Twitter feed algorithm on Git yesterday as open-source. I know how to read code and know Git, so I had a brief looksy.
First of all, holy hell, I can't believe he let this algorithm see the light of day. It reveals some INSANE biases which are the REAL "Twitter Files", if anyone besides engineers gets interested. My only thought as to why he publicized the code is that Twitter is a wreck and he fired most of his engineering team, the remainder of whom now can't keep up, so he's hoping that by open-sourcing the code, engineers like me will fix it for free. And indeed, you can make pull requests on his repository if you have a Git account (and I do.) I'm not about to help.
(For laymen, a pull request is when you pull the code to your local machine, alter it, and then make a request that your changes get integrated into the repository, which the owner of the repository must approve.) I use Git for version control. Meaning every change is documented and approved. Undoubtedly, Musk will task a remaining engineer with reviewing these Git pushes, and potentially approving them.
Remember when people started complaining that all they saw were tweets from Elon Musk, even though they didn't follow him? Or all they see are right-wing lunatics, even though they didn't choose to see that? There's a literal carve-out in the code to artificially boost Musk and right-wing lunatics. Narcissist much? The code also arbitrarily dumps you into "categories" like Democrat, Republican, Power User, etc. He's also artificially restricting tweets about The Ukraine and bolstering Russia. I wonder who's paying him! Not a mystery.
Every interaction with your tweets gets ranked. Every like is worth a lot. Replies and retweets are worth less. This is opposite of normal (I used to write algorithms for search engines), where a like is passive interaction, retweets and comments are active interaction, which should be weighted more heavily. Negative interactions are also weighted. If you've been blocked or reported, you're punished for that. Your tweets get seen less.
The most insane part of the algorithm (in my opinion) is that if you follow a lot more people than follow you, you get artificially suppressed as "unimportant." That means someone like you or me doesn't get seen. I follow around three times as many people as follow me, which means I effectively do not exist on Twitter. This means that bad actors and bots (who follow nobody, because they aren't human, get artificially amplified.)
Including a video or an image in your tweet artificially boosts you. Including a link to an external website (like a news site) hurts you. Misinformation gets downgraded for normal people. Blue checks boost you insanely. This effectively results in blue-checked people being able to spread misinformation with impunity. As you know, now anybody can pay Elon $8 for that sweet sweet blue checkmark, including bots and foreign actors.
Y'all. Twitter is a DISASTER. If you've used it since Musk took over, you at least suspected it. Musk is a foreign actor and at best, a narcissist. At worst, he's deliberately bolstering the right-wing looniverse (as evidenced by my personal observations, and now confirmed by inspection of his algorithm.)
All of this is not to say, drop Twitter, or to espouse an opinion of what you should do. I'm going to hang out and see what happens. I'm just telling you, as a person who writes these kinds of algorithms professionaly, what the code Elon Musk provided publicly, indicates.
Ian Bogost is the director of the film- and media-studies program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is also a computer-science and engineering professor. He has some interesting things to say about social media. He distinguishes between social networking and social media. He provides an interesting historical overview of failed and successful social media websites.
I read that when it came out, and couldn't agree more.
I'd forgotten about some of those platforms. The "how the hell does that work" moment for me was RSS. I just couldn't wrap my head around stuff arriving, based on my interests, without having to do anything.
Ian Bogost is the director of the film- and media-studies program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is also a computer-science and engineering professor. He has some interesting things to say about social media. He distinguishes between social networking and social media. He provides an interesting historical overview of failed and successful social media websites.
i agree
humans are going to slip, and let us down
i ask myself "what does the path to forgiveness look like?"
some thrive on conflict, some on legit engagement
i still make the effort to engage, understand and then be understood
probably sounds silly, but i've noticed i have better outcomes when i have conversations
some may take longer than others my hope is that this sounds like something HITLER wouldn't say
Not that vegetarians seem to be hyped here, at all... (Hitler was one). The soft part of your message keeps ringing in.. so there may be a shed of hope for mankind, I guess.
There's people taking responsibility of and for themselves, and then there are (strictly) blamers: Ever complaining about others, seeking fault with none other than themselves, most often willfully ignorant of their own, repetetive wrong-doings...
I did both. Joined CounterSocial and Mastodon and Gab (really) and a few others just to stake out my four-letter name, and temporarily deactivated (now reactivated so no one could mess with my brand) my Twitter account.
But it all seems so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. The same people say the same things, have the same viewpoint. And the counter views are fueled by misinformation and irrational hatred. Sometimes RP gets that way, too, which is something HITLER would say. And then it feels sad: I've been here, like some of you, for a couple of decades. It's no fun to see everyone (including me) start bickering and name calling over something as ephemeral and temporary as elections. Those, too, shall pass.
i agree
humans are going to slip, and let us down
i ask myself "what does the path to forgiveness look like?"
some thrive on conflict, some on legit engagement
i still make the effort to engage, understand and then be understood
probably sounds silly, but i've noticed i have better outcomes when i have conversations
some may take longer than others my hope is that this sounds like something HITLER wouldn't say
Steely_D: You managed to include a reference to Hitler! And it was kinda original and actually funny. Well done!
Curious: Are not the chat fora on RP technically speaking 'social media'?
Facebook. Not particularly fond of it but find it useful when something is happening locally, like a murder, wildfire, flooding of Biblical proportions.
Twitter. I have actually learned a few things on Twitter. But I can see it turning rather quickly into the 'same old, same old'. As you point out, there are lots of people whistling past each other. Useful back and forth is the exception.
I am happy to see this proliferation of substitutes for Twitter. Think I will wait for a few glowing reviews of the new sites.
Man, I really wanted credit for the Hamlet quote.
I think of RP as social, surely, but not as widespread as the usual things like FB. I was also very active with some (still) friends on Last.fm but thatâs in the past, and it was also a niche location on the net.
I still have my FB account, since there are people there (from Last.fm) and relatives that I otherwise would hear from a lot less frequently. But it doesnât get my personal life as posts.
