For those worried about Twitter becoming less of an everything-goes-stream-of-consciousness platform and more like Facebook, with carefully curated posts that you have to boost for anyone to see, don’t despair. That time has not yet come.
What has happened, however, is that Twitter is adopting some Facebook-like tactics in using data about who we most engage with on the platform to highlight tweets we may have missed. While reach isn’t determined on the platform by complex algorithms shrouded in secrecy, time is not on your side on Twitter. With so much content flowing in, posts are buried in lost time, and Twitter knows that.
Currently, the “While you were away…” tweets will only show tweets from accounts you follow and engage with regularly, but we can imagine this feature being used at some point to mix in sponsored tweets as well. For now, the move is a way for Twitter to increase engagement on the platform, a metric which one of its founders recently extoled the virtues of.
