Twitter proposal to curate user feeds spurs rage

The social media company’s chief financial officer said displaying tweets using an algorithm would put the most-relevant tweets on top. Many users want things to stay the way they are.

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Since it was launched in 2006, Twitter has always displayed tweets in chronological order, with the newest messages on top.

That may soon be changing. According to The Wall Street Journal , Twitter Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto says users may soon have feeds that an algorithm will organize by relevance.

Here’s the key paragraph from the Journal article:

Twitter’s timeline is organized in reverse chronological order, a delivery system that has not changed since the product was created eight years ago and one that some early adopters consider sacred to the core Twitter experience. But this “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. Timely tweets can get buried at the bottom of the feed if the user doesn’t have the app open, for example. “Putting that content in front of the person at that moment in time is a way to organize that content better.”

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