so I feel like this was an unpopular point of view on twitter, and of course the cohost people have made their decision. understandable! but there are aspects of the algorithmic timeline that I found very useful. in fact, for a long time, my algorithmic twitter timeline was really good! it was the "your friend liked/followed/replied to" stuff that really killed it...now, one can argue that algorithmic timelines will always trend towards this sort of thing. maybe! and I think there are other ways to achieve what I want, and I have hope that cohost will continue to invest in tools that let us curate various feeds.

in my case, the reason the algorithmic timeline was useful was 1. I followed a lot of people and 2. I am time shifted by ~12 hours from a huge chunk of the people I follow. without the algorithmic timeline, my timeline basically became 100% japanese cosplayers and artists...I'd have to scroll a ton to see anything by people in america etc. of course, one could argue that "I did this to myself," and maybe I did, but I mean...the experience was pretty good in the past--the algorhithm did a decent job of surfacing interest tweets from my follows. again, I think there are potentially other ways to deal with this problem, but I do think it is a problem. I don't think the solution is to simply follow less people...this is a data organization problem and I feel like we can come up with better patterns to deal with it

of course, the problem is that once you have an algorthmic timeline, the temptation to tweak it in ways that optimize for likes or whatever become too tantalizing, which is exactly what happened, and earlier this year my twitter timeline became significantly more useless. which is a damn shame