While new Twitter owner Elon Musk is tinkering with the social network’s feature set, more algorithmic recommendations are apparently on the way.
Twitter’s support account tweeted about the change on Wednesday, noting that the platform “expanded recommendations for all users.” Of course, this is under the guiding principle of giving users the “best” content (Instagram likes to use this rule too), but in reality, splitting more recommendations into a social feed makes users expect more paid content as well.
Twitter gave no other details about the change in recommendations, but links to a previous blog post that explained how algorithmic content works and where it can appear. According to the post, “Recommendations may appear in your Home timeline, in certain places on the Explore tab, and elsewhere on Twitter.” As it stands, you can switch between the home feed and “latest tweets” by clicking the sparkle button in the top right corner of the timeline.
It’s not immediately clear if Twitter plans to stream more recommended tweets to the “home” timeline or if it’s something more aggressive, but we’ve tweeted into thin air to ask the company for more clarity. Some users have already noticed changes, which seem to affect home feeds for now.
Twitter offers two different feeds: “latest tweets,” which displays tweets from people you follow in chronological order, and “home,” which is a curated collection of popular tweets from your followers. From our experience, the latter occasionally mixed in some recommendations from outside our following lists, but was mostly a non-chronological collection of tweets from people we did follow.
Given Musk’s habit of quickly rolling out major feature changes (and then rolling them back), we wouldn’t be surprised to see Twitter get heavy handed with recommendations or even change the default feed in that direction, so we’ll keep our eyes peeled for anything significant .
Pre-Musk, the platform planned to make recommendations more prominent, but reversed course after a backlash from users. On Instagram, users have expressed similar fatigue at seeing their feeds full of content from people they don’t follow. For TikTok, offering algorithmically curated content is in the app’s DNA, but many other social platforms need to take a more cautious approach.
Because they were originally designed to let users follow people they already know (or know), apps like Twitter and Instagram have to turn on the algorithmic tap slowly and hope users don’t notice any sudden changes. In this case we will have to wait and see.
