There has been a change in social networks where they are ditching the initial chronological feeds for smarter ones that are suited for users. It started with Facebook and Twitter caught on later.
Twitter noticed that with the initial chronological setup, it was rather easy to miss content that was posted when you were offline. That is why they had the “while you are away feature.” That felt half baked so to speak and that is why over a month ago, they started rolling out to all users timelines that were powered by algorithms to suit your needs.
In order to switch to Twitter’s new timeline, you had to go to settings and choose explicitly “show me the best tweets first.” The old timeline was on by default while the new algorithm powered timeline was opt in. However, it seems Twitter has changed its stance as now the new timeline is now on by default.
https://twitter.com/pablohidalgo/status/710469875353845761
Twitter > Settings > Timeline Personalization > Show me the best tweets first > Off
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 17, 2016
You can see people are not exactly happy with Twitter enabling the new format by default and they prefer the old timeline that displays tweets in a chronological order. This outrage is the same as the one we saw when Twitter announced that they will replace the much loved favourite button for the like button.
The benefits of having the new timeline are there for sure, like being fed content you would want to engage to and for Twitter, it improves on ad conversion for marketers due to better targeting with their new ad strategy. Eventually, all social networks will move to algorithmically powered timelines just like Instagram who announced the same move recently and it is rather futile to fight the new change.
