Twitter makes it hard to spot the old, backwards chronological feed

Twitter is rolling out a change that, frustratingly, makes it a little harder to see your timeline feed.

It was a design change that allows you to scroll between your house’s timeline (rendered arithmetic) and another (reverse chronological). announced Thursday. To set it up, tap the glitter icon in the top right corner. You will see the option to pin the latest timeline. Selecting this brings up the Home and Recent Tweets tabs at the top of the iOS app. If you’re using the menus installed in the iOS app, the layout might look familiar. The feature is available first on iOS and will be coming to Android and the web “soon,” says Twitter. (The company has started testing the feature in October.)

However, to my great disappointment, I found that after testing the feature, I can’t now make the time feed the default option. Instead, I can only use Home as the default or Set up the Home and Recent Tweets tabs and switch between them as needed.

Not everything is bad. If I’m switching back and forth between Twitter and the other apps on my phone, the focus would be when I return to Twitter if the column I’m looking at is recent tweets. But when I force close and reopen the app when I look at the “Recent Tweets” column, Twitter shows the home page feed first. Twitter spokesman Shauki Amdo said that the homepage feed “for now” will be installed first by default, stressing that there is no way to install “latest” first by default.

That seems like a huge step backwards to me. Now on iOS, every time I want to scroll through the feed in reverse order like before, I have to first check if I’m looking at the right feed. Luckily, for me at least for now, the latest can still be the default on the web — including Safari on my iPhone.

Twitter first started rolling out its algorithmic timeline in 2016 (For some slim Sensation) and introduced a sparkle icon to toggle between algorithm and reversal time feeds in 2018. To me, letting the homepage and the latest timelines coexist has always felt like a decent way, but with the change announced Thursday, Twitter seems to be pushing users toward the algorithm. Instagram, on the other hand is the exam back summary of the time.

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