Twitter makes it tough to choose the old reverse chronological feed

Twitter is rolling out a change that makes it a bit more difficult to view your chronological feed.

The design change, which allows you to scroll between the Start (algorithmic service) and Last (reverse chronological) timelines, was announced on Thursday. To set it up, tap on the sparkly icon in the top right corner and you will see the option to pin your "Latest Timeline" if you select it, you will see both "Home" and "Latest Tweets" tabs at the top of the iOS app. If you're using pinned lists in the iOS app, the layout might look familiar. The feature is available first on iOS and will come to Android and the web "soon," Twitter says (The company began testing the feature in October.)

However, to our great disappointment, we discovered that after trying the feature, we are now unable to make the chronological feed the default. Instead, we can have Home as the default or set the Home and Recent Tweets tabs and switch between them as needed.

Not everything is bad. Switching from Twitter to other apps on my phone, if Latest Tweets was the column you were looking at, it will be the center of attention when you return to Twitter. But when we force close and reopen the app when looking at the Latest Tweets column, Twitter shows the Home feed first. Twitter spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo said the Start source will be set first by default "for now" and confirmed that there is no way to set Latest First by default.

This feels like a big step backwards for us. Now on iOS, whenever I want to scroll through a feed-in reverse order likewise always did before, I'll first have to check if I'm looking at the correct feed. Fortunately, at least for now, Latest can still be the default on the web for us, even in Safari on my iPhone.

Twitter started rolling out its algorithmic timeline in 2016 (to a high-profile uproar) and introduced the glowing icon to let you toggle between algorithmic and reverse-chronological feeds in 2018. To us, glow always seemed like a pretty decent way. to allow the Home and Latest timelines to co-exist, but with the change announced on Thursday, Twitter seems to be pushing users towards the algorithmic feed. Instagram, on the other hand, is testing bringing back its chronological feed.