Elon Musk has said that the code for Twitter is like a “fractal Rube Goldberg machine,” and that it may have to be completely rebuilt from the ground up to fix it.
Commentator Dave Rubin shared a thread on Twitter on Thursday, after spending two days at their San Francisco headquarters with Elon Musk and the Twitter team, who are working to fix the Big Tech platform.
Rubin revealed that Musk sees the code for Twitter as a “fractal Rube Goldberg machine,” in that every time they try and fix the code from the previous administration, more problems arise. “A delicate balance he likened to a Jenga tower,” Rubin said. “One wrong move the whole thing collapses.”
Twitter engineers are working on the code “trying to untie the crazy knot,” but still don’t know why “things got so much better once Elon made the acquisition and why it seems far worse now,” with some big accounts being “absolutely crushed” by the algorithm. Rubin said that while the team “still have more questions than answers… they did learn a bunch of stuff.”
At Twitter HQ in SF after midnight.
Stay tuned… pic.twitter.com/SxSMhPDPrO
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) January 26, 2023
Some of those things that the engineers discovered were that there are more “secret” labels added to Twitter accounts that are causing shadowbans on the platforms, with Rubin himself noting that his account was hit with all three, being “recent abuse strike,” “recent misinformation strike,” and “recent suspension strike.”
While it being unclear what the labels do exactly, they certainly suppress views and recommendations. Some tweets are labelled NSFW for NSFA (not safe for ads), which results in the algorithm rejecting the tweet, just because of a “key word” that was on a database. One example of a key word that could trigger this was “gay,” which Rubin said was “overreaching.
“What’s also really crazy now having seen under the hood is that Jack Dorsey repeatedly said they don’t shadowban,” Rubin added. “The entire machine behind Twitter is designed to shadowban. It’s almost as if that was the primary goal rather than the product itself.”
What’s also really crazy now having seen under the hood is that Jack Dorsey repeatedly said they don’t shadowban. The entire machine behind Twitter is designed to shadowban. It’s almost as if that was the primary goal rather than the product itself.
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) January 26, 2023
With the Twitter code being as messed up as it is, Musk believes that the entire code may have to be “torn down” and rebuilt from the ground up, according to Rubin. “Last night he said that the whole situation is ‘a flaming dumpster rolling down the street.'”
Valiant News reported on Wednesday that Twitter had banned Nick Fuentes and Ali Alexander, both close associates of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, despite neither of them seeming to have broken the Terms of Service.
Dwayne Oxford
January 30, 2023 at 6:02 pm
Explains much.