There's no way to actually use this limited release to understand how or why any tweet is boosted, so we're in exactly the same boat we were in yesterday.
What is the net benefit from rushing to condemn something that can only be a net positive compared to the past alternatives? I don't understand the purpose of that approach. Help me.
This seems to be unsubstantiated. Are you really claiming that selective disclosure is always superior to complete lack of transparency?
Are you claiming total ignorance is superior to partial revelation? I think we would all do ourselves better to go live on a desert island and abandon everything about modern life. A shovel might be useful to bury our heads while we're there.
I am claiming that this is at least sometimes true, yes. Not always, but sometimes.
You're the one claiming that partial revelation is always, without exception, superior to total ignorance. That seems unlikely. Propoganda is often partial revelation, are you saying it is always better to receive only propoganda than to receive no information at all?
Like if I tell you that your boyfriend has been having secret meetings with some woman you don't know, with full knowledge that the secret meetings are because she's a photographer and he's planning to propose, have I improved things by disclosing the information to you in that manner? Were my actions a "net positive"?
As long as they don’t try to tackle tweet quality at all separately from engagement twitter will remain unappealing to me.
We pretty much knew this is how all social media works, becuase a) engagement is what they want, why wouldn't they be optimizing for it, and b) how else might you measure 'quality'? Back when this started, I have no trouble believing some well-intentioned engineers thought that engagement was a good proxy for quality. A bunch of users give it the "like", isn't that a collective assessment of quality? Who is to say what quality is, overruling the users in aggregate?
I agree it has the negative effects you mention; and I've read lots of people writing about this, it's of course not a new observation.
But I agree it's good to have an explanation of what's going on, even when parts of are what we basically knew was happening on all social media networks. confirmed is better than "basically knew", for understanding how these things that effect our experiences (and our society) work.
Because selective disclosure is often propaganda. If a third party had chosen what the release or verified this is what's actually running in production, I would praise them.
Considering Elon's incessant lying, self-promotion, and manipulation, it's impossible to be complimentary of this at all. Everything he does is in bad faith.
