Twitter Returns the Timeline in Reverse Order
Either we’ve entered an alternate reality where Twitter cares about its users, or something good actually happened on the Internet for a change: the social networking site brings back the ability to view your timeline in reverse chronological order.
Twitter support announced on Monday that it is working to ensure that users can switch between the graphs with the “most relevant” tweets and the most recent tweets. In the meantime, you can turn off the “Show best tweets first” setting, which will only allow you to see tweets from people you follow, not recommended, or “If you missed” tweets that clog the TL.
In a follow-up tweet, Twitter states that it hopes to “eventually replace this setting when the ease of access switch described above becomes available.”
This happened shortly after the thread went viral explaining how to effectively convert your timeline to a reverse chronological situation. User @EmmaKinema discovered that “disabling Suggest_recycled_tweet_inline and offer_activity_tweet” flipped her timeline chronologically. (Twitter told The Verge that the changes have been in development for some time.)
Twitter’s timeline algorithm was a frequent feature of the site and often complained about, second perhaps only to the Nazis. For those readers who are not active users, the current algorithm means that users can see tweets 12 hours before, mixed with tweets posted just a few seconds ago, which is confusing, especially in the middle of breaking news or events like Super Bowl or Awards Show – people tweet live on the site. Users will also see tweets that are simply liked by the people they follow, as opposed to retweets that hide different features between two actions.
If you don’t trust Twitter to keep the reverse chronological function, there are several ways to get around this besides the hack mentioned in the thread above: you can use a Tweetdeck or Tweetbot and you should be able to view a timeline that is not affected by the algorithm, promoted tweets or modules “in case of a pass”.