Twitter Should Allow Users to Disable Autorefresh

It was on June 1 2020 that Twitter finally shut down its old layout. For those of you who may have never used Twitter or have forgotten, on the old Twitter layout whenver one had new tweets in their feed, there was a message at the top of the feed letting you know there were "(fill in the blank) New Tweets. When one was ready, then, they could click on the message and the new tweets would load. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the new layout that was rolled in July 2019. The new layout introduced autorefresh, so that one might be reading a tweet only to have their feed suddenly refresh. Then one has to scroll down and find the tweet that they were reading.

Twitter's new layout has hardly been a roaring success (many, like myself, actively dislike it), and among the biggest complaints about the new layout has been autorefresh. To wit, a few days ago I was about to reply to a tweet when the feed suddenly refreshed. I was forced to scroll down my feed in order to find the tweet again. Sadly, looking at people's tweets, I am not the only one who objects to autorefresh. In fact, people have been complaining about it since July 2019.

Here I have to point out there are complaints from people who use the web version of Twitter (like myself), the Android version, and the iPhone version. I have read that one can access "Accessibility" under Settings, and click on "Reduce Motion" to minimise autorefresh on Twitter. Unfortunately, while it might work on the mobile apps, it appears to have no effect on the web version of Twitter.

The past few years Twitter has been all about engagement, even though in my ten plus years of using Twitter I have never noticed a lack of engagement on the social media service. What Twitter might be missing is that autorefresh (like the algorithm they seem to want to force on everyone) actually makes engagement more difficult. After all, I have to suspect that here have been plenty of times when people were about to reply to a tweet when the feed refreshed. In many cases they may have scrolled down to find the tweet again, and failing to do so, simply gave up. It then behooves Twitter to fix the autorefresh problem.

My suggestion to Twitter is simply to allow people to disable autorefresh. There could be a place in settings (perhaps under Display or Accessibility) where one could simply check a box labelled "Disable Autorefresh." Once disabled, Twitter would no longer autorefresh and would instead display the old message at the top of one's feed when there are new tweets. I know I would be very happy about that. And I know that it would make many other people happy too.