Twitter owner Elon Musk announced today that he would be making the tweet recommendation code open source. He previously promised to make the Twitter algorithm open-source weeks ago but failed to deliver, and now he has revealed that the code will be released on March 31.
Elon considers Twitter’s recommended tweet code to be “overly complicated” and admits that even his internal team is having difficulty understanding it. He also said that Twitter is working on a “simplified” approach to serving up more compelling tweets, which will be released as open source soon.
Our “algorithm” is highly complex and not fully understood internally. People will find a lot of silly things, but we will fix the problems as soon as they are found!
We’re developing a simpler approach to providing more compelling Tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That too… https://t.co/uxxJe3RT36
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2023
The decision of the Twitter team is primarily to improve the quality of Twitter’s recommendation and gain user trust. Making the algorithm open source would allow the team to fix bugs faster and seed faster development of the application.
Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but this should improve recommendation quality exponentially. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.
Twitter is currently facing revenue difficulties, and is attempting to extract as much revenue as possible from the Elon app. To solve the revenue issue, the company announced the Twitter Blue subscription model and added some features that are only available to its community of subscribers.
Furthermore, making the algorithm open source will significantly reduce the cost of operations compared to proprietary solutions.
