This Valentine’s Day, one thing which is hard to avoid is Elon Musk. Yes, you heard that right. Love him, hate him but you just can’t ignore him, especially from your Twitter feeds. A strange tweak in Twitter seems to be pushing more of Musk’s content in users’ feeds following his complaints about his tweets’ visibility.
Several Twitter users, including we at FETechBytes are seeing our Twitter feed flooded with Musk’s tweets. Twitter’s For You which normally shows tweets based on recommendations of accounts you follow or topics you are interested in is showing feed interspersed with Musk’s tweets and replies. Weirdly, the same is happening for those also who don’t even follow Elon Musk.
This development follows Musk’s complaint that his tweets were not receiving adequate views, which prompted him to make his account private for a day and even fire an engineer over it. Apparently, several right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with had also reported a drop in their reach due to some changes in Twitter’s algorithm.
On Sunday, Musk took to Twitter to share that he had spent a long day at Twitter HQ with the engineering team to resolve two issues. Firstly, the “Fanout service” for the “Following” feed was getting overloaded when he tweeted, resulting in up to 95% of his tweets not getting delivered at all. This issue also destroyed other users’ tweets in the queue. Secondly, the Recommendation algorithm was using an absolute block count, rather than a percentile block count, causing accounts with many followers to be dropped, even if blocks were only 0.1% of followers adding that it was “trivial” to bot spam accounts with blocks.
According to The Verge report, the billionaire held a meeting at Twitter headquarters where he questioned a group of engineers and advisors on why his engagement and reach were dropping. He reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with only receiving tens of thousands of engagements despite having over 100 million followers. He even fired one of the engineers who informed him of his reduced reach and engagement on the platform.
Nothing seems to be in order at Twitter since Musk took over. The microblogging site was recently down for close to 90 minutes telling users they had hit their daily limit. Another Twitter bug which was reported by some Twitter Blue subscribers allowed users to retain their Blue verification badge for free. While Twitter has not responded on why Musk’s tweets are everywhere in the feed, we sincerely hope that it is fixed soon and we get back our old and normal Twitter.
ALSO READ l Twitter Blue bug allows users to retain verification badge for free: Report