It was this big evolution for our services where instead of just ranking content from people or pages you follow, we made this big push to start recommending what we call unconnected content, content from people or pages that you’re not following. The corpus of content candidates that we could potentially show you expanded from on the order of thousands to the order of hundreds of millions. It needed a completely different infrastructure.
Elon Musk has done many things which diminished Twitter but turbocharging the algorithmic timeline is probably the most annoying. It has become enormously sensitive to viral media within your network, broadly construed, in a way that completely swamps content you have deliberately chosen to follow. It’s interesting to see Zuckerberg describe the same process with Reels, implicitly as a way of responding to the threat of TikTok.
I wonder if this trend across platforms can be seen as a TikTokification of social platforms in which the promise of user curation is replaced by the ‘insights’ which emerge at scale about content which will prove compulsive within a network. But it doesn’t track the degrading of attention and engagement in a qualitative register, which ensures the platforms miss a lived experience of deterioration in environments which were once experienced as useful and interesting.
Mark Carrigan 