Today I logged in to check my Twitter feed. However, today I saw something different, my Twitter feed was not the same. There were tweets from people I don’t know, or from topics I’m not interested in on their feed.
Going up and down the feed a couple of times, I figured out what’s difference.
Twitter is showing me tweets which were either favorited or replied by people whom I follow.
Tweets appear from people I don’t follow and topics I’m not interested in
Yes, I do understand that this is a great for brands to increase their reach. But as a user this is just an atrocious experience.
If I want to follow these people I’m going to follow them on Twitter, and some of these topics they show me are things that I’m not at all interested in.
Just because someone I follow favorited a tweet or replied to a tweet does not mean that both of us are interested in the same topic.
Even though this is going to improve the reach, it’s going to give a bad experience to users, it’s ok to see some recommendations from people I don’t know.
But when every other tweet I see is from someone I don’t know, it becomes frustrating.
I miss the days when Twitter supported third party clients, I would have simply swapped my Twitter client to a better alternative that gives me a better timeline.
But since Twitter basically purged third party clients with their api change, we are all stuck with twitters official apps and our timeline becomes what they want us to see, instead of what we actually want to see.
I hope Twitter rolls back on this change, and please don’t ruin my timeline.