Sometimes, Twitter auto-refreshes your feed while you are in the middle of reading a tweet. As you might expect, some people find this to be annoying. Twitter is aware of this problem and intends to do something to fix it.
In a short thread of tweets, @TwitterSupport tweeted the following:
“Let’s talk about Tweets disappearing from view mid-read when the timeline seems to auto-refresh. We know it’s a frustrating experience, so we’re working on changing it. Over the next two months, we’ll be rolling out updates to the way we show you Tweets so they don’t disappear.”
“The background: A Tweet would move up the timeline as replies were added to the ongoing convo. Since some convos can evolve quickly, this made it so you didn’t see the same Tweet repeated in the TL. Our changes will keep your TL fresh and keep Tweets from disappearing mid-read.”
“An update to the disappearing Tweet experience is rolling out for web! Now you can choose when you want new Tweets to load into your timeline — click the Tweet counter bar at the top”.
TechCrunch reported that Twitter acknowledged that in the past, tweets would often disappear from view mid-read when a user’s timeline would automatically refresh. Now, users can load new tweets when they want to.
TechCrunch also reported that Twitter’s iOS and Android apps don’t automatically refresh users’ timelines when they open up the app. Instead, users can click on the highlighted home button on the navigation bar to load new tweets.
I think this is a good idea as it sounds like it will make threaded conversations (or responses to a popular tweet) make sense. If a tweet disappears, it could make it harder to understand the context of the conversation.
Another option is to use TweetDeck. It automatically keeps everything in chronological order. It allows users to click on individual tweets if they want to take their time and read through the responses that tweet got. I’ve never had the disappearing tweet problem while using TweetDeck.