Twitter has updated its platform to prevent auto-refreshing of users’ feeds that caused some tweets to “disappear” while they were reading them. The platform first announced it was working on the update in September, saying “we know it’s a frustrating experience” when tweets disappeared from view mid-read, and the fix is now rolling out to Twitter’s web platform. Users will be able to load new tweets by clicking on a tweet counter bar that will appear at the top of their timelines above existing tweets in their feed.
An update to the disappearing Tweet experience is rolling out for web! Now you can choose when you want new Tweets to load into your timeline –– click the Tweet counter bar at the top.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 15, 2021
The web version of Twitter will now behave the way its native iOS and Android apps already do; neither one auto-refreshes users’ timelines, instead loading the tweets for when the user manually refreshes their feed.
Twitter has been adding new features regularly over the past several months; in addition to its audio chat room Spaces, which it launched almost exactly a year ago, the platform rolled out its Twitter Blue premium service to users in the US earlier this month. For a monthly fee of $2.99, Twitter Blue’s features include the ability to “undo” tweets, ad-free articles from some publishers, and a Nuzzel-like roundup of top articles.
The latest update, like its decision to shut down Fleets less than a year after introducing the expiring tweets feature, suggests Twitter does take users’ feedback into consideration when making changes and updates. Now if we could just persuade them to add editable tweets…
