Like so many of his promises, it’s probably one he can’t keep
Opinion On February 21, Twitter god-king Elon Musk proclaimed “our algorithm is made open source next week.” He added it wouldn’t work well at first, “but it will improve rapidly!” That hasn’t happened.
Musk has been claiming he wanted to open source Twitter’s algorithm even before he took over the social network and again when he announced his intention to acquire it in April 2022. Here we are, and nothing’s changed.
Well, actually, some things have changed. You see, the Twitter algorithm we’re talking about is the rules that rank content on the platform. Each post has a value determined by a set of rules. If you think of it as Twitter’s version of Google PageRank, you won’t be far wrong.
However, if you criticize Musk on Twitter, strange things happen. In my case, I’ve gone from average posts having hundreds to thousands of retweets to dozens. In the meantime, Musk has put a big thumb on the algorithm to make sure you see his tweets. Funny that!
But those kinds of changes are easy. Open sourcing the code is hard.
Now, Musk does know a thing or two about marketing and engineering management.
