Well if they say “we will open source the algorithm” and then what they really open source is a little bit of slightly relevant code that doesn’t allow us to understand the algorithm, then what we can deduce is that they are trying to weasel out of public commitments.

I can’t say for sure if that happened, but if they made a clear promise and then did something else, it’s perfectly reasonable to call that out.

I still hear reverse-FUD about nvidia supposedly fully open-sourcing their Linux driver, when in reality they opened a tiny kernel portion of it that allows the main proprietary blob to connect to necessary kernel interfaces. You have to call out this bullshit when you see it.

Hey, we can get even more cynical. Why should we trust that this code is even similar to what they run in production currently?

Let's have reasonable goals, shall we ? "Their shit doesn't stink as bad as others'" is nothing commendable, especially after souch publicity.

I say "why not both". Even if they are doing it only for good PR, we encourage it by giving them praise, because we should encourage things we want. (While remembering that they are not our friend, they are an entity we should pressure, and the way we pressure is by giving praise when they do things we like, and critcisim when they do not).

I’d give them more credit if they’d been honest and kept it secret then lie to my face and pretend they didn’t?

They should be commended for open sourcing something they don't understand because they fired all of the people whom understood it? Elon admitted as much.

This is like FB open sourcing the compiled frontend code you can see yourself using inspect.

If we commend them for this we're helping promote and encourage this faux open source virtue signaling

It's healthy to have a normal amount of cynicism. They released it for a reason. "The goal of our open source endeavor is to provide full transparency to you, our users, about how our systems work."

Why be transparent (or try to appear transparent)? To convince people to trust your platform (or to recruit - which seems to be another goal of the post). Why would Twitter want or need to do this now? Well, there is a bit of context. This disclosure doesn't exist in a vacuum.