If the new feed isn’t your cup of tea, Twitter is happy to help you turn it off for good (for now at least). When it did so it encouraged people to change their settings but the feature still had to be opted in to.
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Thankfully, if this new algorithmic timeline isn’t something you’re into, you can disable it. To do so, navigate to the app’s setting menu, tap on “Timeline” and then uncheck the option “Show me the best Tweets first”.
Much to the chagrin of anyone who hates algorithms, it appears that Twitter’s new timeline-the one that displays tweets based on importance rather than chronology-is now the default setting for all users. Making “best tweets” the default might annoy some of those power users, but the ability to turn it off means it probably won’t drive many of them away. “The rest of the Tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order, as always”, Jahr wrote. The company told me Thursday that they have been steadily rolling out the change to users around the world for a few weeks now, just as they said they had planned to do all along. It may be a feature you decide you like, but Twitter’s decision to forge ahead and enable it for everyone by default has got many backs up.
It might have been a premature reaction, but starting this week, many users have begun to realize that their feeds are showing them “the best tweets first”, indicating that the feature has switched on across the entire network.
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CEO Jack Dorsey had previously moved to allay user fears of a Facebook-style forced feed, tweeting on 6 February “Twitter is live. By becoming more Twitter-y”. Now that appears to be turned off as Twitter had suggested would happen at launch. He wasn’t fibbing – it just took more than a week.
