Thread by @GergelyOrosz

Twitter open sourced its recommendation algorithm and while my timeline is exploding with analysis of it; all I can think of is: what is the point?

Code without the training data is interesting but useless.

Is it a recruitment tool for devs? Promote Scala? Something else?

Or is it meant to move attention away from the surprising (and likely damaging) decision to remove the “legacy” verified check marks?

I wouldn’t mind seeing Twitter as a business/service thrive, and have no idea what this repo achieves. Outside of devs, it speaks to no one.

I am under no illusion that #TechTwitter is a small niche within Twitter. And yes, this step has interest within this community.

But for “mainstream Twitter”, celebs like LeBron tweeting daily is what brings them back. And Twitter is nudging LeBron to stick to Instagram et all:

https://twitter.com/kingjames/status/1641836984195743749

On how pointless all this is:

I talked with former Twitter engineers who worked on this code and they said that while the open sourced code is in prod, the *majority* of the recommendation prod code is not published.

It’s also not the actual prod code, just a new repo created.