Twitter’s new experiment is confusing dozens of users

You’re going to hate this if you’re a loyal Twitter user. The social network is testing a format for its timeline that doesn’t display tweets in chronological order but arranges them by ‘relevance’ instead.

Twitter is experimenting with arranging tweets by relevance instead of chronology. (Motherboard)

You're going to hate this if you're a loyal Twitter user. The social network is testing a format for its timeline that doesn't display tweets in chronological order but arranges them by 'relevance' instead.

"Yes, this is an experiment," a Twitter spokesperson told Reuters. "We are continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter."

The experiment is, naturally, leaving a lot of people confused.

Twitter's new experiment where it arranges tweets by relevance rather than in chronological order is confusing many users. (Motherboard)

Twitter's new experiment where it arranges tweets by relevance rather than in chronological order is confusing many users. (Motherboard)

Twitter currently has about 320 million active users and the company is trying hard to speed up growth. It's far behind rival Facebook with its 1.4 billion monthly active users. Incidentally, Facebook started arranging its Newsfeed by relevance rather than chronology in 2012.

Twitter's new CEO, Jack Dorsey, has been experimenting with several changes since his appointment in October. Twitter has introduced a number of new features to make the experience easier for new users like "Moments", which wraps up important events in a series of curated tweets, pictures and videos. Last month, it changed its Favourite button to a Like button.

Still changing the order in which tweets are displayed would be the biggest change to Twitter since it started and is likely to be unpopular.