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That feature drove me, a technologist and casual social media user, to use twitter regularly for the first time.

I simply don't have the time or the interest to keep up with a long stream of tweets. It allows me to catch some highlights, and then move on to the never ending live stream.

I don't doubt that there are people who are willing to let Twitter decide for them what content is worthwhile, just that it's sad that that's what the platform is now. A bland community for casual users promoting the same viral content you can get anywhere, rather than a unique community for power users. Those people are only going to see what Twitter decides what is (or what should be) popular which creates a watered-down experience at best, a disturbing and manipulative one at worst.

I follow too many people to read all the tweets and I expect many people do. I created a list of people I don't want to miss tweets from and that helped, but I love the new feature that basically does that for me

> a unique community for power users.

This hasn't been twitter's objective for a long time now. The idea that twitter caters or cares about power users (in my opinion) was put to rest when they decided to severely limit apis and third party tooling years ago.

As a company, they want to be as big as possible which means power users are not their target audience.

This argument works in general, and as much as it annoyed me as a user, I accepted for Google and Facebook changes in the past.

The problem with Applying it to Twitter is that they have never been as big or universal as people assume they are. The median number of tweets from an account is one, active in-stream users lagged freaking Google+ for years, etc. Their shoddy, unintuitive product is practically designed to be power-user heavy, and the network has been so since the beginning. Having a user base thick with big influencers like journalists, celebs, and politicians is a blessing, but Twitter couldn't understand that and blindly followed Facebook's playbook, despite being a hugely different company.

I don't understand why we can't have both. A traditional, unfiltered feed AND a curated one, with users in control what version they want, at any time. Want to see the filtered or curated Twitter? No problem. Want to see the traditional list of tweets? Just switch to that one by clicking a tab. Now powerusers and casual users can enjoy Twitter the way they want.

> I don't understand why we can't have both

Perhaps a non-curated Twitter is bad for business? Twitter and the 'Brands' benefit when the ads show up first, and not below the fold, win-win, right?. I suspect curated Twitter has higher engagement as well, so why keep the other option?

Except that's not remotely true. I have been a big twitter user for years and I am impressed at how unintrusive the change has been. Popular posts are at the very top but the timeline remains mostly unchanged. You're going out of your way to dislike a very small design change.

> I have been a big twitter user for years and I am impressed at how unintrusive the change has been. You're going out of your way to dislike a very small design change.

It might seem unintrusive to you because it doesn't interupt your Twitter workflow, it is definitely intrusive to me and is not a "small design change".

I carefully curate the people I follow, roughly for any given day, I can read the tweets in my timeline written on that day - all of them. When twitter's algorithm "surfaces" certain tweets, it removes them from the regular timeline, so if I dismiss their seemingly randomly selected "While you were away", I wont ever see them again! How brain-damaged is this?

The change works fine for people who have more tweets in their timeline than they can read - which is fine if you trust Twitters algorithm to select the ones you find interesting, and I do not. This is the same bullshit that Facebook does with the very stubborn "Top Posts" ordering

> I carefully curate the people I follow, roughly for any given day, I can read the tweets in my timeline written on that day - all of them. When twitter's algorithm "surfaces" certain tweets, it removes them from the regular timeline, so if I dismiss their seemingly randomly selected "While you were away", I wont ever see them again! How brain-damaged is this?

I have the exact same issue; I follow less than thirty accounts, and I want to read everything from all of them. When I tried dismissing the "While you were away...", I was missing many tweets, so I was forced to turn it back on.

Shameless plug : Try this [1] chrome extension to find popular tweets in your timeline or in search results.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...

I hate that feature so much, I keep telling it to go away and it just keeps coming back.

You can disable it in your settings, if you hated it so much you would have spent the 30 seconds it takes to get rid of it :)

Read my post, that isn't true.

Read my reply, I'm talking about settings, not dismisses.

There's no way to disable that feature.

There are two aspects to the feature. There's not a setting to disable that one. I've disabled the setting that does exist but the while-you-were-away version of the feature persists.

It's disabled in settings. They periodically re-enable it, it's a very user-hostile behavior.

I'm going to expand on this. There are two distinct annoying features.

1. The one you're talking about, messes up the chronological order of the timeline completely. That one is called "Show me the best Tweets first", in settings, and I have disabled it. Some people report Twitter flips the switch whenever they see fit, but that has never happened to me.

2. The second one is a small widget that appears at the top of your timeline that says "while you were away" and shows three tweets. There is no way to disable this. This is what it looks like on a desktop: http://i.imgur.com/R6rPRGo.jpg There are similar ones for mobile. I don't personally care too much about it (I close it... just one of hundreds of annoyances I have to put up with when I use a computer) but there's a huge problem: those three tweets are removed from your timeline, wherever they were. So they mess my timeline up (someone might have tweeted two things in rapid succession, and one of the tweets goes missing because they move it up to that widget). And there is no way to disable this, at all.

I believe that even when you dismiss the recent tweets box, the tweets still don't return to your timeline.

It's baffling bad.

Yes exactly. It's embarrasing. Those tweets are just removed from your timeline and there's no way you can make them return. For someone like me who follows just a few people and intends to read the entire timeline, it is very very bad.

That's their core product there and it's broken. And they don't care. I miss the twicca days... That's the Twitter I liked, a chronological stream of text. I mourn for it.

It's also one of very few changes I've seen (one of which was changing the icon and word for the favorite/like action [which was a breaking change as far as I'm concerned; it changed the semantics of past discussions and eliminated the personal bookmarking aspect]).

I cannot imagine what Twitter is spending its time doing.

Twidere for Android is a great client that respects chronological ordering, saves your previous position, and doesn't show ads. I don't know of a desktop solution. I just put up with their shitty website and avoid it whenever possible.

Add this filter to your uBlock Origin "My Filters" tab:

  twitter.com##has-recap

Edit: To be clear, this hides the dumb "while you were away" box, which is useless for people who read everything anyway like myself.

As a passionate user since 2008, that feature made Twitter much better. Once you follow 1,000+ people keeping up is impossible. The new tweet-bumping (self-reply) and algorithmic features make Twitter a much more pleasant place.

It now feels much less overrun by marketers. Real interesting discussion is once more possible. Just like the old days.

Discussions? With the Twitter character limit? You can't be serious..

Ironically, your response would fit in a tweet.

Because it's not a typical contribution to a discussion, it's just a very simple truth..

> It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline.

I'm baffled by this, too. Which is it?

Clicking the dislike button returns a "Okay, we'll show you less like this in the future", which leads one to believe that it's tweet content, not the timeline shenanigans.