In a controversial move, Twitter has brought back a feature that removes the ‘Latest Tweets’ view for users on iOS, which is something that many users, including me, hated back in March 2022 – and it’s now rolling out.
The first time the company decided to do this, ‘Home’ would appear first in a tab at the top, and there was no way of changing it so that ‘Latest Tweets’ would be the default view. It was reverted back after the company said it was a ‘bug’ for iOS users.
This time though, it’s no bug. Instead, it’s ‘For You’ and ‘Following’ where you can only swipe between them now, which doesn’t make much sense for a platform where you’re using the platform to keep up to date with who you follow.
It’s a bizarre change that makes me ask – who wants this, especially during a time when its new owner, Elon Musk, is bringing in and reversing changes almost every week still?
This one change will have big consequences for Twitter
See the Tweets you want to see. Starting today on iOS, swipe between tabs to see Tweets recommended “For you” or Tweets from the accounts you’re “Following.”January 11, 2023
You look on Twitter to read the latest tweets from your followers – that’s the first thing that most users do when they load up Twitter on an iPhone or Android device. It’s a way of keeping up to date with what’s going on.
I’ve got friends who use it as a rolling news feed, similar to how an RSS feed used to work back in the day, which was a way of subscribing to certain sites and being given a page of all the aggregated content in one place.
With this new switch rolling out with no sign that it was accidental, it sets a risky precedent for the platform that the ones in charge simply don’t know how its users interact with Twitter. It makes finding content harder to discover with these new tabs, and above all, it looks bad from a design perspective.
In what feels like I’m in a sequel to Groundhog Day involving Twitter, let’s hope we see this feature reversed, then binned, and never seen again.