Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, announced today that he will make tweet recommendation codes open source. He had previously promised to make the Twitter algorithm open-source weeks before, but had failed to deliver, and has now revealed that the code will be released on March 31.
Elon considers Twitter’s recommended tweet code to be “overly complex,” and admits that even their internal team is having difficulty understanding it. He also stated that Twitter is working on a “simplified” approach to serving more compelling tweets, which will be released as open source soon.
The Twitter team’s decision is primarily intended to improve Twitter’s recommendation quality and gain user trust. Making the algorithm open source will also allow the team to fix bugs faster and seed the application’s rapid development.
Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.
Twitter is currently experiencing revenue difficulties, and Elon is attempting to extract as much revenue as possible from the app. To address the revenue issue, the company announced the Twitter Blue subscription model and added some features that are only available to the community of its subscribers.
Further, making the algorithm open source will significantly reduce the cost of operation compared to a proprietary solution.