Why Twitter’s algorithm sucks
Twitter makes following people useless. (Photo: Twitter)
Any Twitter user will tell you there’s a lot of noise on the platform. Non-Twitter users will tell you Twitter is just noise. But Twitter has been making a lot of changes to its algorithm, and it has users wondering how much of it is noise that they didn’t even sign up for.
In a visual essay for Nightingale, Tyler Freeman takes data from his own Twitter feed and takes a deeper look into how much of his Twitter Feed comes from “Strangers” or people he does not follow.
Freeman found that 56% of his feed is from Strangers, 31% from “Friends” or people he actually follows, and 13% are just ads. Even worse, upon closer inspection, Freeman found that out of the 2,300 people he follows, 90% of them never appear on his Feed.
Freeman points out the problem of the shrinking bubble. Twitter shows you more tweets from accounts you interact with often, which means you’ll interact with them even more often. By design, you’re less likely to see posts from accounts you don’t interact with, even if you follow them.
The pool of tweets you actually see from people you follow gets smaller and smaller, and the algorithm fills in the gaps with more and more “suggested” content from Strangers. This is content that Twitter thinks you’ll want to see. Before you know it, your Feed is 90% Strangers and only 10% Friends. So what’s the point of following people if you’re not going to see their tweets?
Twitter hates your friends
As of 2022, Twitter has 436 million active users. An average of about 500 million tweets are sent out on the platform per day. There is an oversaturation of tweets, and users can’t possibly see every single tweet from every account they follow and still be interested in scrolling. And Twitter really, really wants users to keep scrolling.
Like every other social media platform, Twitter is constantly making changes in the way it operates, tweaking features every now and then with the hope of keeping people engaged.
The math is simple: the longer users spend scrolling, the more ads they see, and the more money Twitter earns.
The algorithm supplying Twitter users with suggested posts from Strangers is only one of the strategies they’ve used to keep people’s eyes glued to the screen. Last month, they decided to implement a version of the Home timeline that prioritizes relevant tweets over recent tweets, sparking outrage from users who primarily use Twitter to keep up to date with the latest news.
Twitter has also been criticized for the extremism and misinformation that their algorithm favors, as well as some inherent biases in its image cropping algorithm.
Clearly, Twitter has a long way to go in refining its algorithms, and they’ve laid out many plans to assure users that they are working on it. Let’s just hope that once Twitter gets its shit together, we’ll finally be able to see what our friends are tweeting.
