The fanout bug was in weighting how blocks affect visibility and fanout. Apparently it was an absolute and not a relative thing, so the huge amount of blocks musk has affected their visibility.

You don't, at least for me, I have 5700 followers and most posts (with art) only see 200-500 impressions, whereas a year ago I was getting 3000 on average. The Following tab is clearly (at least for me) not in timeline order, so most of my followers never even know I posted anything. Since I post art most of my followers are artists, so you would think they would see them. Impressions (which are Twitter putting tweets in a timeline so that people scroll by them) are not under the control of the poster. Likes per impression for me are up, so interaction is higher which is supposed to increase how often tweets are shown, but only timely retweets seem to help any.

I am trying to figure out how the algorithm decides on what to show in the Following tab, but the code is way too big to analyze without being able to run it and look at logging/metrics/stats.

Should have called him "Big E" to obfuscate

The most hilarious things to me was when I was reading some (unrelated to this drama tweet) posted in an article and the top recommendation was Musk's tweet that he doesn't artificially promote his tweets.

From what I understand of upthread, it doesn't "give elon musk's tweets a boost", rather any change which downgrades musk's visibility is considered a regression.

Obviously the end result is similarly that musk's visibility can never decrease, but it's a more technical (and to the letter) compliance with the specifications.

Sounds like you are reading minds here.

Now someone is surely getting fired.

It was widely reported in the days following the Super Bowl that he personally ordered his Tweets be boosted after a Tweet by Biden got more engagement than his similar Tweet [0].

As far as I can tell, he did not instruct Twitter employees to make his Tweets appear to all users, but he did want them to make his posts appear in timelines significantly more often. This lead to reports of users suddenly getting their timelines flooded with lots of his Tweets.

It seems like there was a rush within Twitter to raise Musk’s engagement numbers by altering the recommendation algorithm to specifically boost posts from his accounts. The special boost factor was later reduced, but allegedly still exists.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

looks like evolve2k is himself the source. maybe he was a twitter employee ?