“The time has come,” the Walrus said—or, in this case, the sneaky mountain bluebird of Twitter. As reported last month, Twitter has been planning on making a few adjustments to the way everyone’s timeline populates. Well, the new and not-so-improved algorithmic feed is finally being rolled out, and people are flipping out about it. Clearly, Twitter didn’t notice all of those glorious reaction GIFs and tweets containing #RIPTwitter, because the company is still somehow standing. A spokesperson for Twitter recently told The Daily Dot, “As we said in our announcement, we’re rolling out our timeline improvements to everyone over time. People can still choose to opt out of it in their settings.”
Wait, people can simply opt out? Why didn’t they say so earlier? (Oh. They did.) Okay, but to be fair, it’s really difficult to crack the code on how to turn this new feature off. Fans of the old chronological Twitter feed will need to go all the way over to their settings page, scroll down to the content section, and then (If they haven’t already smashed their computer in a rage…) uncheck the box that says “Show me the best Tweets first.”
In all honesty, this algorithmic change really is ridiculous, because it completely screws up the order of many users’ tweets. For most, their timelines are no longer in reverse-chronological order but instead prioritized seemingly haphazardly. In a few cases, people are even saying that their feed is made up of mostly promoted tweets. On the bright side, if you missed all of those hilarious St. Patrick’s Day tweets from beer companies yesterday, it’s your lucky day.
This comic pretty much sums sup my twitter exp – The long, slow death of Twitter https://t.co/ew0G4wSIT2 #RIPTwitter
— Vimal Kandoth (@V1mal) March 14, 2016
.@twitter, half my feed is promoted tweets, wtf. One had a button to share my fucking email with them.
— mmmPi (@mmmPi) March 18, 2016