How Twitter is fixing ‘disappearing tweets’
Twitter on Tuesday said they are making it less frustrating to navigate its timeline and view tweets on the web by eliminating auto-refresh which means there will be no more disappearing tweets.
On Twitter.com, you may have occasionally found yourself in the middle of reading a tweet when it suddenly disappears.
In its bid to show you the most current tweets, Twitter automatically refreshed its timeline, but that often happened at inopportune times.
Twitter Support has explained that this happens because “a tweet would move up the timeline as replies were added to the ongoing convo.”
With an update to the web platform, though, this disappearing tweets issue should no longer happen. Instead, users will have the option to refresh their timelines by pressing the tweet counter bar at the top of the page.
The background: a Tweet would move up the timeline as replies were added to the ongoing convo. Since some convos can evolve quickly, this made it so you didn’t see the same Tweet repeated in the TL.
Our changes will keep your TL fresh and keep Tweets from disappearing mid-read.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 22, 2021
Users will decide when to refresh your feed by “clicking the Tweet counter bar at the top.”
The update, which was first announced in September, has now rolled out.
The Android and iOS apps for Twitter already don’t refresh timelines automatically, instead wait for users to tap on the home button to load new tweets.
This is one of several changes Twitter has been making to its platform recently.
In October, it rolled out a tool to remove followers discreetly, and it began testing a warning prompt when users were about to engage in a conversation that could get heated or intense.
Twitter also recently announced that it will no longer automatically crop image previews on the web, after rolling out full-size image previews on mobile earlier this year.
On Twitter for the web, images will now display in full without any cropping. Instead of gambling on how an image will show up in the timeline, images will look just like they did when you shot them.