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Comment by notahacker

10 hours ago

Twitter's communication style being based around brevity, slang, memes, spam and non-threaded conversations seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs

>Twitter's communication style being based around brevity

Is this still true? Every once in a while someone sends a link around to some madman explaining how race or economics or whatever "really" works and it's like a full dissertation with headings, footnotes, clip art. They're halfway to reinventing Grok-o-pedia right there in Twitter. I mean X. I was promised that "X gonna give it to you" but it turns out "it" is some form of brain chlymidia.

  • Elon was running some sort of $1m competition for the “best” Twitter post for a few months. I think those type of dissertations about Phrenology and the like have fallen off a cliff since the competition ended.

    • Ooohhhh. I am both glad and horrified to know this. Not how Seneca told me life would be when I learned things.

  • There's probably a selection bias involved. I haven't been a regular user for a while now, but the big threads like that were significantly outnumbered by individual posts. Meanwhile I'm not likely to send a link to someone of a single single-sentence tweet, because there's not enough meat to it. The stuff that could be shared would usually be an image from the tweet, which I could share directly.

> Twitter's communication style [...] seems particularly unlikely to be helpful for optimising LLMs

This depends on what one wants to optimize the AI for. ;-)

And the amount of bots there isn't helpful either.

  • recent changes in their comment system have reduced my exposure to bots to a level I much prefer over every other platform I use

    • How recent? As recently as last weekend I was seeing blue check marks replying with AI generated only-technically-related replies on top of the majority of the posts I looked at.

    • There are bots here too, lot of them, to a point that rules were amended, this is because it's very valuable to give points to new publications

    • If that's actually true, good for them, but after what I've witnessed there not that long ago, I doubt I'll try it ever again.