Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Sunday said that engineers resolved two significant problems on the platform during a “long day at TwitterHQ” with him. He said the ‘Fanout service for the Following feed’ was getting overloaded when “I tweeted, resulting in up to 95 percent of my tweets not getting delivered at all”. “Following is now pulling from search (aka Earlybird). When Fanout crashed, it would also destroy anyone else’s tweets in queue,” Musk added. Also Read - Elon Musk beats Barack Obama to become most followed person on Twitter
He also said that the recommendation algorithm was using absolute block count, rather than percentile block count, “causing accounts with many followers to be dumped, even if blocks were only 0.1 percent of followers”. Also Read - Twitter launches new API with free, basic, enterprise tiers
“Also, it’s trivial to bot spam accounts with blocks,” the Twitter CEO said. Musk also said that oversized fonts and undersized paragraph spacing will be fixed this week. Also Read - Elon Musk to Twitter users: Only verified accounts can vote from April 15
“Advertising also needs to be semantic keyword-based, so it’s contextually relevant. Amazingly, ads shown when doing twitter searches don’t consider the search words! We’re changing that as fast as possible,” Musk informed.
When a user said that Blocks are quite powerful and “seems like for accounts with a lot of reach, they’ll probably get blocked a lot”, Musk replied that the giant block lists are problematic.
“They mess up the recommendation system & create a DDoS vector,” he added.
