Don’t worry, they’re going to change it back.
Everyone loves to complain about Twitter (TWTR) – Get Twitter, Inc. Report, but almost no one ever leaves it for long.
Since debuting in 2007, the social media service has become a cornerstone of modern life, whether we all like it or not. It’s been blamed for ruining our collective attention spans, sucking many of us into annoying and/or inscrutable dramas and spreading dangerous misinformation.
Plenty of people like to say, often on Twitter, that they are sick of Twitter and are quitting it for real this time. But how many people actually follow through with quitting, and what is the overall effect that has on the company?
It’s an open question at the moment, as the service seems to continually go through dips in popularity, only to surge back, usually when a major news event (such as the omicron outbreak or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) has people glued to their phones for an update.
Twitter had hit a bit of a lull near the end of the last decade, dropping to 321 million monthly users, down from 326 million in the last quarter of 2018. But last year the revenue in the second quarter of 2021 was up 74% to $1.19 billion. It turns out that, despite their many promises, all the supporters of President Trump didn’t quit en masse when he was banned from the platform.
Twitter uses frequently call for more moderation of the service and, before he left, harangued former CEO Jack Dorsey to take a more active role in removing malefactors such as abusers, white supremacists and people who spread Covid-19 misinformation.
But what users did not want was for the company to actively make the service even more annoying and difficult to use. From the perspective of a great deal of Twitter’s user base, though, that’s exactly what happened with their latest update.
What Change Did Twitter Make That Got Everyone So Mad?
Last week Twitter introduced an update that made it so that users had to choose between two different configurations for their Twitter feed by tapping the “Sparkle” icon in the top right corner. One timeline is “Latest Tweets,” which are current Tweets as they come in from the accounts you follow, served in chronological order
The other way of viewing the timeline it is the “Home,” option, in which Twitter will serve up the most popular Tweets of the moment, as determined by the company’s algorithm.
Many users were annoyed by the change, and were frustrated that they couldn’t have the “Latest Tweets” option as the default. There were also frequent complaints on Twitter that it was confusing or annoying to have to toggle between the two options, as social media needs to be an intuitive, fast process for it to be of value to users.
There does seem to be something deeper behind the outrage. Many people use Twitter as a constantly updating news source, for better and for worse, and people who are going to the service for, say, the latest news about Ukraine find themselves annoyed when faced with Tweets that are not relevant to their current interests.
But why is Twitter so gung-ho about its “Home” timeline option and force-feeding people popular Tweets? (The company has been dinged for putting popular Tweets on a users timeline, even when they didn’t follow the account.)
Well, when you sign into a streaming service, you will be offered the most popular movies or albums first, because the company wants to keep you hooked and prevent subscriber churn by offering you what it thinks are its most popular products. In Twitter’s case, that its most popular Tweets. From the company’s perspective, it thinks it’s giving you what you want so you’ll stay on the platform.
But plenty of Twitter users actively resent the algorithm that the company uses to promote Tweets, as it can favor people who are already famous and popular, and clutter your feed with Tweets that you are not interested in or find annoying.
Twitter is a place where people go to express their opinions, and users were not shy about telling the company what it thought about the change.
Twitter Promises To Change It Back
On its support account, Twitter let users know they had been heard, and that it would switch the timeline back to the chronological option.
“We take feedback seriously, and in this case, we heard the new pinned Home & Latest wasn’t giving you the level of control over your timeline that you want,” said Twitter spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo in a statement to The Verge.
But while things might be back to normal for now, Twitter is not done making changes. Jay Sullivan, VP of consumer product, said the company is going to continue to possibly tinker with the timeline in the future, in order to achieve “a balance for all.”
