Elon Musk spends long day at Twitter HQ, fixes 2 key problems

Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Sunday said that engineers resolved two significant problems on the platform during a "long day at Twitter HQ" with him.

He said that the 'Fanout service for Following feed' was getting overloaded when "I tweeted, resulting in up to 95 per cent of my tweets not getting delivered at all".

"Following is now pulling from search (aka Earlybird). When Fanout crashed, it would also destroy anyone else's tweets in queue," Musk added.


He also said that the recommendation algorithm was using absolute block count, rather than percentile block count, "causing accounts with many followers to be dumped, even if blocks were only 0.1 per cent of followers".

"Also, it's trivial to bot spam accounts with blocks," the Twitter CEO said.

Musk also said that oversized fonts and undersized paragraph spacing will be fixed this week.

"Advertising also needs to be semantic keyword-based, so it's contextually relevant. Amazingly, ads shown when doing twitter searches don't consider the search words! We're changing that as fast as possible," Musk informed.

When a user said that Blocks are quite powerful and "seems like for accounts with a lot of reach, they'll probably get blocked a lot", Musk replied that the giant block lists are problematic.

"They mess up the recommendation system & create a DDoS vector," he added.