Okay, I gave it a real shot. When the whole #RIPTwitter thing blew up over the rumor that Twitter was ditching the chronological timeline entirely, I rolled my eyes along with everyone else. Then when the feature actually rolled out on the 10th, I told myself I'd use it for a full week before complaining about it in public. Well, it's the 18th now. I lasted eight days.
For anyone who managed to avoid the freakout: buried in your account settings there's a checkbox, on by default for a lot of people, that reorders your timeline so tweets Twitter thinks you'll care about get bumped to the top when you open the app after being away a while. Jack Dorsey was quick to point out that this isn't the same as Facebook eating your whole feed with an algorithm, it's just an "in case you missed it" clump at the very top, chronological order underneath. Fine. Technically true. Didn't change how it felt actually using it.
Here's my real problem with it, and it's not the algorithm-bad-chronology-good argument everyone's been shouting on both sides. It's that the "best" tweets it picked for me were wrong, constantly. Not offensively wrong, just boring. I follow something like 340 people, a mix of local folks, a couple game devs, a few journalists I actually like reading. Every single morning for a week, the top of my feed was some huge verified account's tweet with four thousand retweets that I genuinely did not care about, while three actually interesting replies from people I actually talk to sat buried five scrolls down, because they didn't have the engagement numbers to get flagged as "best." The algorithm optimizes for popularity, not for me, and Twitter's been acting like those are the same thing. They're not.
So Tuesday night I went and unchecked the box. Timeline's chronological again. Boring old scrolling-through-everything-in-order, and it's genuinely fine. I don't need my Twitter to be smart. I need it to show me what the people I follow said, in the order they said it, and let me decide what's worth my attention.
(Unrelated complaint while I'm already irritated at software: my thermostat app crashed twice this week trying to reconnect after that snowstorm knocked our wifi out Monday night, and now it's convinced it's 62 degrees in here when I can see my breath in the kitchen. Nobody asked, but "smart home" stuff has a real talent for turning a five-second manual task into a fifteen-minute troubleshooting session. End of tangent.)
What actually bugs me about the rollout is less the feature itself and more how it happened. Twitter didn't ask. It flipped the switch for a huge chunk of users and let people discover it by noticing their timeline felt off, which is exactly how I found out about it, three days late, wondering why some rando's joke tweet kept camping the top of my feed. That's a pattern I've watched play out with basically every service I use at this point. Ship the change on by default, let the opt-out exist for the people annoyed enough to go dig for it, and bank on most people not noticing or not caring enough to change it back. Probably works great, honestly. Most casual Twitter users I mentioned this to had no idea the setting even existed.
I get why they're doing it. Growth's been flat for a while and somebody in a product meeting looked at the numbers and figured a Facebook-style relevance feed keeps people scrolling longer, which, fair, it probably does for the average user. I'm clearly not the average user though. I'm the guy who wants his timeline in the actual order things happened, weird tangents and all, and that seems to be a shrinking category of person to design a product around.
Anyway. Box unchecked, timeline back to normal, and I feel a slightly unreasonable amount of relief about something this small. If the setting's been quietly annoying you without you knowing why, it's in your account settings, near the bottom of the page. Took me longer to find than I want to admit.