Transitive Twitter Followers?
March 16, 2022 9:55 AM   Subscribe

Suddenly I'm seeing a lot of tweets by people who are followed by people that I follow. These are not labeled "Dave Liked..." or "Dave Retweeted...", they are labeled "Dave Follows...". It is my understanding that they appear in my timeline not because one of my follows highlighted them, but because Twitter did. Is this new? How do I turn this off?

Because I hate it.
posted by rlk to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)
 
You're seeing the "Home" rather than "Latest" timeline, which is Twitter's idea of what you want to see. There should be 3 stars (2 small and one big) to the right of your feed which you can click to change to "Latest". (As a warning, Twitter decides at random intervals to change it back to "Home".)
posted by scorbet at 10:00 AM on March 16, 2022 [2 favorites]


One way of avoiding any algorithmic messing around from Twitter is to use a third-party Twitter client like Twitterific or Tweetbot, which will give you a straightforward chronological timeline of tweets from people you follow.

(although they also are unable to support some features like polls properly, so you will find yourself visiting the website sometimes)
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 10:15 AM on March 16, 2022 [3 favorites]


Also no ads.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 10:16 AM on March 16, 2022


Response by poster: Yeah, I've noticed that Twitter likes to switch me to Home unexpectedly, and I've switched it back many times. And indeed now the star button says "Your timeline shows the latest Tweets" and the only button is to "Switch to Home". So I'm inferring that transitive follows are now a feature of Latest.
posted by rlk at 10:24 AM on March 16, 2022


Best answer: They've been messing around a lot recently - I briefly had the option of either only having Home or a tab to switch between Home and Latest (but not only Latest). I have also seen what you're seeing in the past, but it sorted itself out again relatively quickly. It's really frustrating though when it happens.
posted by scorbet at 10:38 AM on March 16, 2022 [2 favorites]


Best answer: I'm definitely on Latest, and not seeing transitive follows. But. After they got rid of the Home and Latest tabs again, earlier this week, Latest was messed up for me in all sorts of unwelcome ways until I force-closed the app and reopened it. You might be dealing with the same thing.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 12:07 PM on March 16, 2022


Response by poster: Bouncing the app did indeed clear up this issue! Twitter does finally seem to have recognized that people want to see tweets in the order they appear.

In other news, someone that Barack Obama follows got a haircut.

Thanks all!
posted by rlk at 1:01 PM on March 16, 2022 [2 favorites]


I've had the phrase "suggest_recycled_tweet_inline" (no quotes) muted for years and, regardless of what Twitter decides to test out, I never see what my follows like or reply to (if I don't already follow everyone in a conversation). There's a few other terms that might seem to help, as seen in this tweet. (I use web Twitter on desktop and a third party client on iPhone.)

My small side account does not have that phrase muted and I do see the suggested tweets as you've mentioned.
posted by lesser weasel at 6:29 PM on March 16, 2022


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