You Can Never Go Back to the Old Twitter
The platform’s return to a chronological timeline won't be enough to recapture its original magic.
Twitter is bringing reverse-chronological timelines back. It won’t be the new default, but CEO Jack Dorsey announced that you’ll be able to go back to the simplest way to organize a timeline with a setting change. Uncheck “show the best tweets first,” and out will go the algorithmically shaped experience—tweets from 4h ago, lingering with tweets from 10s ago—and in will come the old rhythm, the newest tweets first.
Reverse-chron was the schema of . For a time everything was reverse-chron (). Blogging was reverse-chron. Twitter was reverse-chron. It’s the logic of news: watching this thing, the Emmys, the game, the dissolution of the republic, the hurricane, the hearing.
