SAN FRANCISCO
Twitter owner Elon Musk on Friday put out the word that he will make public the long-secret algorithm for recommending tweets.
The code used for recommending the posts suggested to users will become open source at the end of March, Musk said in a tweet of his own. People will discover many silly things, but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found! Musk tweeted.
Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality.
Musk contended that the recommendation algorithm used at Twitter is overly complicated and not fully understood inside the company.
We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress, Musk said. Making the code open source would mean developers, including aspiring rivals, would be able to put their own spins on the algorithm, according to a foundation for the software ecosystem.
Since billionaire Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October, the platform has suffered outages, layoffs and seen advertisers flee over the lack of content moderation.
