How Elon Musk is changing the Twitter experience

Nearly six months after buying Twitter, Mr. Musk made changes that changed what people see on the platform and how they interact with it it.

Elon Musk said he wants to turn Twitter into an all-inclusive app people can use for payments, news and food orders.

"The purchase of Twitter is an accelerator for the creation of X, the application of everything," Musk said in October, weeks before completing an acquisition of 44 billions of dollars from the social network. He then said that Twitter could be like WeChat, the popular Chinese app that combines social media, instant messaging and payment services.

But nearly six months after Mr. Musk took over Twitter, his ambitions for the platform have remained mostly ambitions.

Although the billionaire has made dozens of changes to Twitter , they were largely cosmetic. Its changes mainly affected the appearance of the platform, said Jane Manchun Wong, a freelance software engineer who studies social applications. These updates include the addition of additional symbols and metrics displayed with tweets, but the core elements of Twitter, which make it a place to quickly share news and discuss live events, have not changed.

Yet user experiences are changing. That's because the types of tweets they see are affected by Mr. Musk's behind-the-scenes tweaks. It tinkered with the algorithm that decides which posts are most visible, threw out content moderation rules that ban certain types of tweets, and tweaked a verification process that confirms user identities.

The result is a Twitter that looks like it always has, but is clunkier and less predictable in the tweets that pop up and are seen, users said. In some cases, this has caused confusion. Even Twitter employees expressed their frustration.

Last month, Twitter designer Andrea Conway posted about the design changes saying, "We We know you hate it. We hate it too. We're working to make it less crap. The changes, she added, could eventually render Twitter "completely unusable".

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

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

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

Mr. Musk split the News Feed in two. Now, when users open the Twitter app, they see an algorithmically curated "For You" feed, which mimics a popular feature on TikTok, and a "Following" tab.

The "For You newsfeed incorporates changes Mr. Musk made to Twitter's recommendation algorithm, attracting more tweets from people a user doesn't follow and suggesting new topics and interests It also means that users can see posts from all sorts of content creators that they may not be interested in. At one point in February, the algorithm flooded users' feeds with tweets...