The news came through in a tweet where Musk cited open sourcing the algorithm as part of a larger effort to develop a simplified approach to delivering more compelling tweets for users. 

According to Musk, the current state of the algorithm is overly complex and not even fully understood internally. “Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality,” he said.

“People will discover many silly things, but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found,” said Musk. 

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1636838845894279168?

However, open sourcing your code introduces a slate of possibly bad outcomes. Open sourcing how tweets are recommended is meant to be used as a tool to get the public to note and suggest changes to vulnerabilities. It may also be used for hackers to identify those same vulnerabilities to take advantage of. 

Open sourcing the algorithm would also allow Twitter’s competitors and rivals to add their own spins to the algorithm. Even if the developer working on your open source code is not a bad actor, many are hobbyists, and could depreciate the quality of the code if not carefully scrutinised before updating. 

Since the billionaire’s takeover of the social media app in October of last year, the app has seen massive layoffs, running on roughly a third of the size of the team that worked at Twitter before the takeover. Twitter has also had investors fleeing, app outages, and a growing disregard for content moderation due to existing staff being unable to keep up with the demand. 

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While apps such as Mastadon had an uptick in users following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, alternatives to Twitter have not seen sustained growth.

That means there are arguably no significant rivals to Twitter, offering the same scale and reach as the platform for users who were unhappy with Musk’s changes. These changes include: moving the main source of revenue for the company from advertising to subscription offerings, as well as ousting the user-verification blue checkmark in an attempt to commodify it for the perks it holds on the app such as being prioritized in the feed. 

However, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta announced earlier this month that they are working on a standalone, decentralized text sharing social media platform that would rival Twitter. 

Meta’s new app could drastically change the usership of Twitter if some integral problems on the Twitter are not addressed as soon as possible. However, the question remains: is open source the best way to do that?