Twitter is rolling out a fix for the annoying issue of tweets disappearing suddenly due to your timeline refreshing automatically. The company is making this feature manual. You will require to “click the Tweet counter bar at the top” to refresh your Twitter timeline. While this means new tweets will not automatically load into the timeline, it will ensure that a tweet does not disappear from the screen when you were mid-way through reading it.
This update will be first available on the web version of Twitter. Availability on mobile apps should follow in the coming weeks. The company hasn’t provided an expected timeframe though.
“An update to the disappearing Tweet experience is rolling out for the web,” Twitter Support said Monday. “Now you can choose when you want new Tweets to load into your timeline.”
For the uninitiated, whenever someone replies to a tweet or the tweet author threads it, Twitter’s auto-refresh feature moves the original tweet up the timeline. Twitter says this is to ensure that you don’t see the same tweet multiple times. But this feature often caused an annoying issue of tweets disappearing from the screen when you were still reading them. And if a thread has high engagement, this is more likely to happen.
Twitter knows that it can be a frustrating experience for users. To that end, the company in September said that it is working on a fix for this issue. “Our changes will keep your timeline fresh and keep tweets from disappearing mid-read,” Twitter Support said back then. “Over the next two months, we’ll be rolling out updates to the way we show you tweets so they don’t disappear.”
The first of the promised updates are now rolling out to users on the web. Note that the changes may not be immediately available to everyone. We will be keeping a close eye on if Twitter has any other changes in the plan to address this issue. We will let you know as and when we have more information.
Twitter will also stop automatically cropping images on the web
Twitter recently announced that it will no longer crop images automatically across all platforms. The company had already stopped doing so on mobile apps earlier this year. This change is now coming to the web version as well. This means you will see the full image on your timeline rather than a cropped part of it, which can often be misleading. This change started rolling out last week.
2021-11-16 15:05:38