The day my old Twitter feed stopped making sense to me

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Brooklyn back in 2018 and noticed my feed was all weird. It used to show posts from real people I followed, now it was full of random video clips and news from accounts I never clicked. That was the first time I realized the algorithm changed how content gets pushed around. Has anyone else noticed a big shift in their feed around that time?

3 comments

3 Comments

colethomas4d ago

Remember exactly when that happened. Fall 2018 for me too. My feed started showing me hot takes from strangers I never followed instead of my friend's dog pictures. Did you ever figure out what actually caused the switch? Was it some internal meeting where they just decided to kill the chronological timeline for good?

phoenix_martin404d ago

Could the meeting have been a Monday morning thing between two product managers?

betty_perry243d ago

Yeah I used to just assume it was some random product tweak they rolled out without much thought, but honestly your point about it being a Monday morning meeting between two managers makes so much sense. I remember the exact fall of 2018 when my feed went from chronological to chaos, and it felt way too deliberate to be a simple bug fix. Now I'm picturing some conference room where they mapped out the whole algorithm switch over coffee and stale bagels. It actually explains a lot about why they didn't warn anyone or test it properly first.