Here’s Why Twitter Users Are Super Upset With Twitter

Kyle Krajewski
February 10, 2016
Categories

Twitter is my favorite social network.  I try and keep up with my personal account and tweet pretty much every day.  The whole concept, in my opinion, is far better than Facebook.

Examples:

See?

It’s just the perfect combination, tbh.

Because of my love for this model, I’m often troubled when I hear rumors of @jack and the gang making drastic changes (i.e. when everyone said they were “jack”ing [I’m so sorry] up the character limit to 10,000).

When I logged on a few days ago, it seemed that I had something to be troubled about.

#RIPTwitter? Algorithm?

More like FACEBOOK?!?!?

Oh, God—please no! WTF is happening?

Calm down and let’s have looksee. Here are a few things you need to know:

The Algorithm…

What I imagine an algorithm looks like.

I know what you’re thinking—I thought it too:

“Great. Twitter’s new algorithm just means Twitter is going to ‘think’ they know what I want to see when, in reality, they’re just going to be clogging up my timeline with more ads.”

Not necessarily—but kind of.  The new feature will essentially aggregate ‘the best tweets’ almost like what we’ve recently seen with the subtle ‘what you missed’ feature, but at the top of your timeline.  You’ll no longer see tweets in reverse chronological order, coming in as they happen, but the tweets that got the most engagement or the tweets that you may most often engage with will be seen.

So yeah, kind of like Facebook, but not really—because there’s more…

What it looks like

Aside from the timestamps on tweets we see now, your timeline isn’t going to look much different than it already does: tweet after tweet after tweet. But of course, they will just be organized a bit differently, into groups of ‘best tweets.’

The good part is that you’ll still be able to access the reverse chronological order with this feature turned on.  If you simply refresh your feed, your timeline will remove the non-chronological tweets.

So it almost is kind of like “what you missed” but more prevalent.

You shouldn’t be worried… yet.

Did you catch what I slipped in a couple of sentences ago?

“…with this feature turned on…”

That’s the deal currently.  The change is strictly opt-in—so if you think you’d like it, you can check it out by doing the following:

If you decide to try it out, you can always change it back… for now.

That same guy, Brian Reis, a Mashable editor, shared Twitter’s rebuttal to the outrage we’ve seen over the algorithm.

So what do you think? How would you feel if Twitter removed the opt-in feature and made the algorithm official? I personally think that Twitter is great the way it is—but to each their own.

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