So algorithmic filtering is coming to Twitter. According to CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, it isn’t rolling out this week, as some initially speculated, but it is almost certainly coming in some form, very soon. And while it likely won’t kill Twitter — despite what some hysterical Twitter users seemed to fear — it is not a magical solution to Twitter’s problems, and it does have some pretty clear downsides for users.
As the hashtag #RIPTwitter started trending following BuzzFeed’s initial report on Saturday, the corporate Twitter machine went into defensive mode: Dorsey responded with a series of tweets saying he was listening, and that Twitter values the traditional timeline, and noted Twitter investor Chris Sacca said that there was “zero chance” the chronological view would disappear.
The argument from defenders of a filtered feed, including Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz, is two-fold: 1) Since many new users find Twitter confusing and it takes time to find accounts worth following, giving them an algorithmically-sorted feed is a good “on-boarding” strategy. And 2) Almost everyone who follows more than a handful of people misses plenty of tweets already, so sorting things via algorithm isn’t really much different, and probably better.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
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