So Twitter finally did the thing everyone's been dreading since that BuzzFeed report a week or so back. On Wednesday they put up a blog post called something like "never miss important Tweets from people you follow," which is corporate-speak for "we built you a robot editor and its taste is not your taste." Theres a new toggle buried in settings, under Timeline, and if you flip it on Twitter will supposedly show you the tweets it thinks matter most at the top, then the rest in order after that.
I want to be fair here because Jack Dorsey did tweet, back when the rumor first broke, that the timeline itself wasnt going anywhere and people were overreacting. And technically hes right, this isnt a full News Feed-ification, its opt-in, its off by default, and all it does is rearrange the top of your timeline before dropping back into chronological order. Thats a real distinction. #RIPTwitter was trending for basically a day over something that, in practice, is a checkbox you can ignore.
I flipped it on anyway Wednesday night because I wanted to see for myself instead of just complaining about a rumor like everyone else did. By Thursday morning I'd turned it back off. Not because it was broken, it worked exactly as advertised, it just wasnt for me. It kept surfacing the same three or four accounts with the most engagement and burying the smaller, weirder accounts I actually follow Twitter for. If I wanted an algorithm deciding what I see I'd just look at my Facebook feed, which I already do reluctantly maybe twice a week.
Heres my actual complaint, and its not really about the algorithm quality, its about what it signals. Twitter has spent four years telling me the chronological stream was the whole point, the thing that made it different from Facebook, the reason journalists and live-tweeters and people watching a hockey game together loved it. Now the stream is being treated as a legacy mode you have to opt out of an alternative to get away from. Give it a year and I'd bet money the toggle flips from opt-in to opt-out, and eventually it just becomes how the app works, full stop. Im not mad about today's version. Im mad about where today's version is clearly headed.
(Also, unrelated tangent, but does anyone else find it very funny that the feature launched on the exact same week LIGO announced they detected gravitational waves from two black holes slamming together 1.3 billion years ago? I stayed up for that press conference audio Thursday morning, half asleep, in my kitchen, listening to a guy named Rai Weiss basically start crying on a livestream because forty years of work just paid off. Then I opened Twitter and the top tweet in my "best tweets" timeline was some brand account's black hole pun. Great system, love it, working as intended.)
Anyway. If you havent seen the toggle yet, its Settings > Timeline > "Show me the best Tweets first." Try it if you're curious. My money is on most people leaving it on simply because most people never open settings at all, which is honestly the real story here — not the feature, but the fact that defaults are basically the whole product now. Whoever picks the default wins, no matter how loud a few thousand of us get on the day it ships.
Also, small housekeeping note that has nothing to do with any of this: my RSS feed link in the sidebar has been broken since I redid the theme back in December and at least two people have emailed me about it. Its fixed now. Sorry it took two months, I am one person doing this on evenings.