Have you been seeing a lot of random Tweets from accounts you don’t follow lately? Well, you’re not alone. Recently, many Twitter users have expressed their frustrations at Twitter’s new ‘For You’ Feed, which seemingly highlights a random array of accounts and Tweets, along with Elon Musk’s latest missives, which now get maximum exposure in the app.
Purposed?
It would seem that not all of those highlighted in Twitter’s ‘For You’ Feed are random. All of the Tweets you see are actually linked back to your activity in some way, with Twitter now working on a new option that could help you better understand why you’re seeing them in your stream.
As seen in this example posted by Twitter designer Andrea Conway, Twitter’s experimenting with a new option that would enable users to tap through on the three dots menu on any Tweet to get a new ‘Why you’re seeing this Tweet’ element. Within that, users would then receive a brief overview of some of the reasons why that specific Tweet is popping up on their Feed including their activity, mutual follows, related interests based on in-app actions, etc.
Instagram has a similar option within its main Feed, which has moved away from users’ social graphs, opting to instead focus on content itself, which then enables it to show users an expanded range of popular posts, designed to help increase engagement. That has shifted the paradigm for every other app, and whether you like it or not, Meta has seen a significant increase in user engagement as a result of showing people more things from accounts they don’t follow, on both Facebook and Instagram.
Twitter is now gunning to do the same, though thus far, it has been met with conflicting user responses. Part of the challenge for Twitter in this regard is that it’s the key source of real-time news and updates, with the system seemingly not knowing if a Tweet is popular until at least an hour or so behind time. That would equate to its For You Feed essentially being populated with older Tweets, which seems to run counter to the app’s core offer.
If these claims are true, then that at least suggests that these Twitter recommendations are working, to an extent, by providing more context as to why you’re seeing each update in-stream. That will make users more comfortable and engaged in what’s there. It certainly can’t hurt. The new ‘Why you’re seeing this’ option is not yet officially in testing, with Conway sharing only initial mock-ups of what the option might look like.
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