Twitter is now showing everybody mostly Elon Musk's tweets
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If you were wondering why your Twitter feed is full of Elon Musk's replies on the platform, then you are not alone. Most Twitter users have been facing this issue, even those who do not follow Musk's account, The Verge reported.
The issue appears to have cropped up on Monday afternoon, U.S. time, when users began seeing Musk's replies to tweets in their "For You" feed. If you have interacted with Musk's replies in the past, Twitter's algorithm is likely to show you more of the same content. However, for those, who haven't the change is surprising.
Twitter: Working for the boss
The timing of the change is suspicious as Musk spent time with engineers at Twitter's headquarters over the weekend trying to figure out why his tweets were not reaching out to his followers.
Long day at Twitter HQ with eng team
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2023
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
Musk has nearly 129 million followers on the platform. However, as per publicly available data on his tweet impressions, the number is rather low.
When one of the remaining principal engineers at the company offered a possible explanation for the low interaction, Musk allegedly fired him. As per The Verge's previous report, the engineer pointed out to Google Trends data where Musk enjoyed a score of 100 in April 2022 which has since dropped to a meager nine now.
While that seems like a plausible explanation, Musk, as the boss at Twitter, probably did not take it well that his popularity had waned in the aftermath of buying the social media platform. Instead, the platform seems to have been overloading user feeds with Musk's words of wisdom like "Well said" or "Agreed".
Unlike the Twitter outage that happened recently, this move was clearly not accidental with Elon Musk himself tweeting this meme, a few hours ago.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
At the time of writing this, the issue seems to have been rectified after another late-night Elon Musk tweet, asking for users to be patient while changes are being made.
Will this incident further dent Musk's popularity on the internet remains to be seen? Alternatively, users might end up migrating to other platforms such as Mastodon or perhaps even one from Meta.
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