[alm1]

I feel like authors are thinking about the "algorithm" almost as if it's just a bunch of if-else statements in a tree.

Read only audit is an overly naive way to think about understanding complex algorithms. In an audit they would find an enable of large DNN transformer models with thousands of layers and thousands of features often with their own transformation trees. There are entire CS departments dedicated to researching tools to understand complex nonlinear models. You definitely can't do with a read only code audit. You can _barely_ do it with full access to the model, full access to the input data and being able to retrain and rerun the model on that data.

[CrimsonCape]

You are suggesting the people who read HN and might click over to the "open Twitter" codebase won't understand it?

Engineers don't exist in a vacuum, the same engineers who write the algos are here on HN. Show HN the Twitter source code and a lot of engineers will understand it.

What is more likely is that the engineers are currently bound by NDAs and can't say what influences the algo.