Let me try to explain what @elonmusk meant for those of you that aren’t software devs. Elon has 128M followers. Everytime he tweets, a service called Fanout is in charge of inserting his tweet into all of his follower’s queue of tweets that show up in their following tab.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1624660886572126209
Your following is comprised of a list of tweets that Twitter caches for you based on people you follow. When Elon would tweet Fanout was supposed to add it to the queue but it was likely overloaded by his reach and it not only killed his tweet in your list but all of the others.
Now you can see why engagement was low across the board. If this was happening because of Elon’s big following it was also happening because of other celebrities tweeting as well. The big fish were killing their own tweets and others.
Now moving on to the second issue. Twitter uses how much you’ve been blocked by people to suppress your views on ALL other feeds for everyone else. In essence if the masses thing you’re toxic they make it so that even those that haven’t blocked you won’t see you. Sounds ok?
We won’t discuss the ability for this to be exploited by to suppress people. The issue was that there was a grave error in the way they were implementing this. They were using the total number of people that had blocked you to determine if you were toxic instead of a percentage.
So naturally if you have a big following and say controversial things you’re probably blocked by a lot of people. Even if it’s a small percentage of your total following, the sheer fact that a lot of people blocked you would cause Twitter’s algorithm to silence you. The end.
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