Elon Musk, owner and current CEO of Twitter, declared this Wednesday that Twitter would have made changes to the algorithm of its “For You” section, due to complaints from some users.
According to Musk, many users complained that they were seeing a large number of tweets from people who did not follow in this section, so Twitter would have decided to make changes to improve the experience of its users.
Changes made to the “For You” section of the Twitter feed
Musk’s comments were in response to a Twitter user who posted that people were reporting “massive drops” in the engagement (impact, commitment and/or repercussion with the audience) of their publications.
The complaints received by the CEO of Twitter, who has recently taken over the company’s public relations, included reports about the sudden disappearance of accounts that usually interacted in the feed, the random display of videos in different languages, the scarce appearance of publications of followed accounts and the excessive sighting of tweets from unfollowed accounts, which in cases turned out to be foreign to the preferred content profile.
Recap of the recent changes, a week ago, Twitter wrote about the introduction of the “For You” tab in your support account. In a thread of tweets, the company noted that that tab, along with the “Following” tab, would be pinned to the top of the timeline.
On the one hand, the “Following” tab, as its name literally indicates, is responsible for filtering the feed so that users see only the tweets from the accounts they are following. On the other hand, the “For You” tab offers a mix of tweets from followed accounts with other recommended tweets from unfollowed accounts. These two tabs arrived as a replacement for the tabs previously present in the feed, called “Home” and “Latest”.
In itself, the proposal is not bad on a conceptual level, but specifically, considering the aforementioned claims, the way in which it was implemented ended up compromising the user experience of the platform.
Taking charge of the received claims, Twitter took action on the matter. “An update to the ‘For You’ algorithm included too many tweets from people users were unfollowing”, tweeted Musk. “That change has been reversed”he added.
Twitter users can currently swipe between the “For You” and “Following” tabs in their main feed from within the iOS app, where this change was initially implemented. Similarly, this option is available in the web version of the platform, where the change was recently implemented. This modification has not yet reached the Android app, but it will be introduced soon, as the company previously assured.
