I personally know a FAANG employee whose full time job is building tools to try and help understand why the company's recommendation algorithm picks the things it does (and more specifically, predict how changes to the algo will affect that).

Even the people who build these systems barely know what the algorithm is going to do, much less why. It will be a herculean task to try and convey that to an average user.

Right. Also, it takes a new eng hire N years to gain a working understanding of the small subset of code that their team produces.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to twitter, so I may be misunderstanding something. On my Twitter Home Screen there are three little stars on the upper right of the central container which allow you to toggle between "top tweets" (ie. 'The Algorithm') and "latest tweets" which is the time based ordering.

What you are misunderstanding is that there is more social clout to be gained by complaining about twitter than exploring the available features. The ability to sort by latest doesn't stop people from feeling self righteous by demanding this feature exist.

You understand it, it's just like instagram, facebook, reddit etc, you let them pick something for you via some algo or you order by date.

Maybe it's a room full of lava lamps.