New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….
Original story (published on July 19, 2022) follows:
Twitter can be a very useful tool for those who want to be aware of the latest trends on the minute.
For this, Twitter offers the ‘topics’ feature. Once you choose some favorite topics, or Twitter detects that you follow many accounts related to a particular topic, you will start receiving recommendations.
Recommendations seek to offer tweets that are relevant to users interests. This way, they can continue discovering more relevant accounts and profiles to follow.
But it seems there is currently a problem with the topics feature. Apparently, timelines of many Twitter users are filling up with irrelevant or random topics.
Twitter timelines full of irrelevant topics
Multiple reports indicate that the Twitter ‘topics’ feature is currently ‘broken’. Many users keep getting hundreds of irrelevant tweets on their timelines, negatively affecting the experience.
In some cases, the issue is so severe that users get more tweets from irrelevant or random topics than tweets from the profiles they follow.
For some reason when I follow a topic my entire homepage is full of garbage. Is there a way to follow a topic without having 10 millions other topics? I try clicking ‘not interested’ on like 100 of them but more and more keep popping up. Source
I’m tired of constantly getting topic suggestions. I keep pressing not interested in this topic but still I keep getting another new topic suggestion. It’s just getting tiring at this point. Can’t I see just tweets of accounts that I’m following?
I don’t want to see tweets related to a celebrity or a sport or anything that I’m not interested in. If I’m interested in something I’ll just follow it. You say not interested in this topic for one topic then get another suggestion the cycle continues. Source
Users feedback and a potential workaround
Some Twitter users have offered suggestions to avoid these types of problems. For instance, some recommend that the company should implement a ‘switch’ to turn off all recommendations.
There is no official acknowledgment on the issue from the Twitter team yet. But for Twitter users on web browsers, there are extensions (such as ‘Hide Twitter Trends’) that allow you to get rid of recommendations.
Unfortunately, there is no similar workaround for the Twitter mobile app yet. But if you are okay with using Twitter through a mobile browser, you can use one that is compatible with some desktop extensions (like Chrome).
We will update this story as events unfold in the future.
Update 1 (July 29, 2022)
06:47 pm (IST): Twitter team confirms that they are still working on solving the issue where users get many recommendations of irrelevant topics for them.
Update 1 (November 24, 2022)
04:39 pm (IST): Fresh reports (1, 2) suggest that users are still getting irrelevant tweets in their feed. And now some accounts are also getting mistakenly shadowbanned (1, 2, 3).
Luckily, Elon Musk has acknowledged the shadowban issue and said that the team is working to resolve it. However, they didn’t provide any ETA for the fix.
Update 2 (November 25, 2022)
06:25 pm (IST): Several users are now reporting (1, 2) that Timeline is not loading or updating properly for them on mobile app. However, it seems to be working perfectly fine on desktop.
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