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by partiallypro 2925 days ago
If Twitter ever moves to a fully algorithmic timeline like Instagram (has annoying done), it will shrivel up and die. The linear timeline of Twitter is what makes Twitter....Twitter. I've noticed a lot lately that more and more I see tweets out of order because of the algorithms. I believe you can turn that off, but sometimes those are useful...but more often they are spam in the moment, especially if a big story has broken. I feel like it used to only occur when you first opened up Twitter, you'd see old highlights...now it feels like it's intertwined more...it's very annoying. Twitter is, by far, the most powerful and useful social media platform out there for information...I sure hope they aren't going to strangle it to death.
2 comments

Unfortunately you can't turn off the algorithm which treats other people's favourites as if they were retweets, which makes me think twice about using the favourite feature at all. I know I've had stuff put into my feed which the person doing the favouriting would never have retweeted.

I wrote an extension/user script to filter those - and retweets - out into their own lists on the front page [1], as I just want a chronological timeline of what people are saying now, which mustn't be "engaging" enough for Twitter's purposes.

[1] https://github.com/insin/manage-twitter-engagement#readme

I second what you noticed. I now see myself with a WTF expression on my face when I am trying to figure out what happened with the linear timeline and all that junk I pretty much don't care about inserted in what I am interested to read. Feels like random ad inserts. Not good.