“Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm.'”
Musk Bombed
If you, dear reader, logged onto Twitter last night and found your For You feed to be uncharacteristically Elon Musk-heavy, rest assured: you weren’t alone.
Just days after news emerged that the Twitter CEO had fired an engineer in a fit of rage over his account’s uncharacteristically low engagement numbers, it looks like the Twitter owner had one of his remaining employees tweak the algorithm in his posts’ favor.
The move was seemingly confirmed by the sudden, widespread Musk-bombing of Twitter feeds.
In fact, Musk’s own late-night tweets appeared to confirm the recent change.
In true Elon Musk fashion, the billionaire posted an extremely horny meme featuring one young woman captioned as “Elon’s Tweets,” force-feeding another young woman labeled “Twitter” a bottle of milk.
Three hours later, he sent out another tongue-in-cheek tweet, suggesting that engineers at Twitter had been tinkering with the algorithm.
“Please stay tuned,” he wrote, “while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm.'”
The “Algorithm”
While it’s unclear what Musk meant by throwing some quotations around the word “algorithm,” it’s not a stretch, as Marx noted, to assume the tweet is related to the engineer-firing incident and his tweets’ sudden appearance on practically every timeline.
He’s been vocally upset about his engagement rate on the platform for a while now. He went as far as to take his account private to see if that could allow him to reach more of his followers.
The Musk-bombing of Monday evening also comes a day after the Twitter owner announced that several of the platform’s “significant problems” had been “mostly addressed,” the first of which was, of course, related to his own engagement stats.
“Fanout service for Following feed was getting overloaded when I tweeted,” he wrote, “resulting in up to 95 percent of my tweets not getting delivered at all.”
Surely, that issue was “fixed” — and then some. We wouldn’t be surprised if Musk will have Twitter engineers build him a big red button for the next time he complains about waning engagement on the platform.
After all, it’s his expensive toy, and he can play with it as he so chooses.
READ MORE: Elon Musk’s Tweets Are All Over Twitter, Which Is What He Wanted All Along [Gizmodo]
More on Elon’s engineers: Elon Musk Furious at Twitter Engineers Because People Aren’t Faving His Tweets