On Social Media,​ A Chronological Feed is Never Coming Back

I joined Twitter almost a decade ago and it’s changed a lot over the years. In the beginning, you’d see the fail whale more than you should, they added official support for retweets, likes, and offended all 3rd party developers multiple times.

One of the worst moves for me was where they added the, “you may have missed” section at the top of the feed. In fact, this alone annoyed me enough to stay with Tweetbot.

I’ve been adamant that a chronological feed is the right answer and everyone should embrace it, but this year I made a change in how I use Twitter and I started following more people. Previously I kept my total following count to around 150, and if I followed someone that posted a bunch I would unfollow or mute. Now I’m currently at 326 and the feed is unusable. Every time I go back to check it says I have 100’s of unread and I don’t have time for that, so I just scroll to the top, read around ten, then close it and go on about my business.

Unless everyone decides to follow a very select 50 to 100 people the stream is unusable and it just can’t adapt to a constant flow of 300+ people. So the ranked and weighted feed is the only way to show you highlights and keep you sane.