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How Elon Musk is changing the Twitter experience

    Elon Musk has stated that he wants to transform Twitter into an all-encompassing app that people can use for payments, news, and food orders.

    “Buying Twitter is an acceleration of creating X, the everything app,” Mr. Musk Posted in October, weeks before a $44 billion acquisition of the social network was completed. He later said that Twitter could resemble WeChat, the popular Chinese app that combines social media, instant messaging and payment services.

    But nearly six months after Musk took over Twitter, his ambitions for the platform have remained largely the same: ambitions.

    While the billionaire has made dozens of tweaks to Twitter, they have been largely cosmetic. His changes have mostly affected the look of the platform, said Jane Manchun Wong, an independent software engineer who studies social apps. Those updates include adding more symbols and stats to display with tweets, but the key elements of Twitter — making it a place to quickly share news and discuss live events — haven’t changed.

    Yet user experiences are changing. That’s because the kind of tweets they see are affected by Mr. Musk’s behind-the-scenes tweaks. He’s tinkered with the algorithm that determines which posts are most visible, ditched content moderation rules that ban certain types of tweets, and changed a verification process that confirms users’ identities.

    The result is a Twitter that resembles the way it always has, but is clumsier and less predictable in which tweets are popped up and seen, said users. In some cases this has caused confusion. Even Twitter employees have expressed their frustration.

    Last month, Andrea Conway, a designer at Twitter, Posted about the design changes, saying, “We know you hate it. We also hate it. We are working on making it less annoying.” The adjustments, she added, could eventually render Twitter “completely useless”.

    Mr Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

    So what looks different on Twitter now and what are the changes underlying the tweaks?

    The most notable difference is Twitter’s News Feed, the stream of messages people see when they open the app. Newsfeeds previously appeared as a single stream of posts, displaying tweets from only the accounts a user followed.

    Mr. Musk has split the news feed in half. Now when users open the Twitter app, they’ll see an algorithmically curated “For You” feed, which mimics a popular feature on TikTok, and a “Follow” tab.

    The “For You” News Feed features changes Mr. Musk made to Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, bringing in more tweets from people a user doesn’t follow and suggesting new topics and interests. That also means users can see posts from all sorts of content creators that they might not be interested in. At one point in February, the algorithm flooded users’ feeds with tweets from Mr. Musk.

    This is what a user’s “For You” news feed looks like, with an example of a tweet from an account the user doesn’t follow suggesting the algorithm. If users only want to see posts from people they follow, they’ll need to switch to the “Follow” tab.

    Mr. Musk has also tweaked Twitter by adding a deluge of color-coded checkmarks, belying a deeper change in how the platform confirms the identities of organizations, governments, notable individuals and other official accounts.

    Twitter previously offered white-and-blue checkmarks for users who were “verified,” a kind of badge for those who had substantiated their identity and who were typically public figures, such as politicians and celebrities. The check marks were free.

    Mr. Musk has started charging users an $8 monthly fee in exchange for a tick, with the free ticks starting to disappear this month. He essentially favors subscriber payments, assuming that a tick meant an account was noteworthy.

    Now, yellow check marks indicate corporate accounts, while gray check marks indicate government official accounts. Companies can also add their logo to employees’ accounts to verify their employment. People who pay get the blue and white check mark.

    Those who paid for ticks get a boost from Twitter’s recommendation algorithm and are eligible to appear in people’s “For You” news feeds, Mr. Musk said last month. That would prevent spam accounts from abusing the algorithm and appearing at the top of the “For You” news feeds, he added.

    For most of Twitter’s history, users could only like, retweet, or comment on a post. The number of replies, likes and retweets then appeared at the end of a tweet.

    Under Mr. Musk, every tweet now has more stats. He added a count that shows how many times a post has been viewed, saying that the total number of views is a better indicator of a post’s popularity than the total number of likes or retweets. Twitter has also added a count for the number of times a tweet has been flagged and saved.

    That means each tweet now has the number of replies, likes, retweets, bookmarks, and views added to it. Here’s an example of what tweets looked like before, when there were fewer numbers, and after, with more statistics.

    What do all these movements achieve? Not necessarily the smoothest experience, some Twitter users and contributors said.

    “Twitter has joined the ‘crazy uncle’ contingent,” said Chris Messina, who is known as the inventor of the hashtag, adding that he now sees featured tweets that don’t match his interests. “In terms of the product, I think overall the quality has really gone downhill.”

    Additional production by Jeanne Noonan DelMundo.