No, it’s not a nightmare: many users’ Twitter homes are invaded by Elon Musk’s tweets. We knew that the Tesla CEO was self-centered, but certainly not up to this point. Seriously, the situation is somewhat paradoxical given that many users are reporting this real invasion of tweets. But what exactly is going on? Let’s try to understand each other more.
Twitter: homes invaded by Elon Musk’s tweets?
The “problem” seems to refer mainly to Twitter’s For You feed, the one that shows us the posts that the algorithm believes may be of interest to us (from users we follow and not). This entire section seems to be monopolized by Elon Musk’s tweetsto the point that since yesterday afternoon there have been several network users who have reported this anomaly.
Is everyone else’s entire For You page Elon replies 😅
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) February 13, 2023
A paradoxical condition on which Elon Musk himself made fun of with several tweets. Posts that, of course, everyone saw, willy-nilly.
A bug after the algorithm?
On Sunday (February 12) Elon Musk had announced that a change to the platform’s algorithm would arrive a few days later.
Long day at Twitter HQ with eng team
Two significant problems mostly addressed:
1. Fanout service for Following feed was getting overloaded when I tweeted, resulting in up to 95% of my tweets not getting delivered at all. Following is now pulling from search (aka Earlybird).… https://t.co/oMW54chhRz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2023
The Verge reports that Musk, a few days earlier, had publicly complained about the low visibility of his tweets. According to the portal he even fired an engineer for this. According to The Verge, which analyzed insight data from Elon Musk’s Twitter profile, the account would have reached its peak popularity (based on searches and interactions) in April 2022. Since then, interest seems to have organically decreased.
Now the algorithm seems to finally give visibility to Elon Musk’s tweets. There’s only one problem: now we only see tweets from Elon Musk. A small dream for an Elon, a big nightmare for users.