Since none of Elon Musk’s so-called “new” additions to Twitter so far are actually new, his “Twitter 2.0” should really be called “Twitter 1.5”. Instead, they are all variations of previous Twitter experiments that Elon then re-pitch as upgrades as he pushes them on the platform’s users.

This is Musk’s most recent “new” addition: The ability to swipe between your algorithmically-defined “Home” timeline and “Latest” tweets was removed from Twitter just four days later. Because the “Home” timeline method kept showing people old tweets, tweets from people they didn’t follow, tweets that their connections liked, etc.

Users, as noted by Twitter, do not want alternative timelines; they prefer the most recent tweets to appear in the main feed. As a result, they are re-releasing as “new Twitter navigation” because it appears that Elon and co. have not discovered this feedback while going through previous Twitter documents.

Let’s face it: making it as simple as possible to switch between the timeline of tweets from people you follow in chronological order and the algorithm-defined feed has some value. Twitter will be hoping that this repurposed side-swipe navigation will eliminate user frustration while also enabling it to continue pushing more tweets into people’s feeds. Over the course of the past month, Twitter has been attempting to push a wider range of content into the main feed in order to expand tweet discovery. This has generally only caused people to become enraged.

Because, as TikTok demonstrated, accurate AI-based recommendations can increase engagement and retention. While Twitter’s algorithm isn’t quite there yet, the company wants to make sure that users keep that feed active in order to improve its systems and hopefully increase engagement by showing more people content in the app that they will like.

As a result, you can anticipate that Twitter will continue to open to the current feed of content that has been followed and recommended to you. However, all you need to do to get to the experience you actually want is swipe sideways.

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