Twitter Open Sources Its Recommendation Algorithm
One of the few things Musk positively contributed.
Musk finally did it.
The Twitter ranking algorithm is now open source and available on GitHub. Written in Scala and made to scale well to serve 5 billion requests per day, the algorithm code is released under the AGPL license.
The most interesting bits so far are that the algorithm was designed to recognize whether the author of a tweet is democrat or republican:
(
"author_is_democrat",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsDemocratsFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
(
"author_is_republican",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsRepublicansFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
)
It is not clear yet whether Twitter used to boost or deboost tweets based on this information or not, but the algorithm at least had the ability to detect that and report the metrics back to Twitter admins.
Twitter devs have since then removed that code.
Elon Musk and Blue subscribers also had their own hard-coded rank boosting as well.
Additional ranking factors can be seen in this tweet:
The Twitter Engineering team, along with Elon Musk, discussed the new open source algorithm on a Twitter Space yesterday. You can rewatch it if you are interested:
There can be a dozen things to criticize Elon Musk about, but this step is one of the few rightly-done steps toward more transparency. We need to have more social media giants open-sourcing their ranking algorithms; society as a whole will improve when more than a few individuals are in the course of changing how the entire world communicates with each other.
The pull requests on the GitHub repository are quite funny at the moment… Check them out for a laugh. 😄
Share with us your thoughts on this matter in the comments below.
Last Week Open Source News
We follow open source news from all over the Internet so you don’t have to.
Ubuntu Cinnamon is now part of the official Ubuntu flavors family. It has been 4 years since this distribution appeared to the light, and now it is being recognized as an official Ubuntu release, which should increase its popularity in the future.
Blender has added Wayland fractional scaling support, which means the software should appear properly scaled under any Wayland compositor in the future.
SUSE replaced its current CEO with Red Hat’s senior vice president, Dirk-Peter Van Leeuwen. Expect to hear more about SUSE and its products in the future.
Someone hooked GPT4 to Blender, so that you can now use text prompts to do various designing tasks in Blender easily:
Interesting Stuff from the Web
These other news, discussions and articles might be interesting for you, all related to either Linux or open source software:
The team behind Digicam Finder (a website specializing in providing data about digital cameras) has open-sourced their data, providing specifications about more than 2,500 digital cameras since 1994.
Bloomberg launched their own FOSS Fund. They will donate $10,000 in each voting cycle [of their staff] to various open source projects. In this voting cycle, they will donate to curl, Apache Arrow and Celery.
This guy published a guide on how to make an open source Espresso machine. Fun read.
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