An unfiltered stream is a core feature
This might seem like a small thing, similar to Twitter’s move to insert tweets that other people have favorited into a user’s stream if there aren’t any recent tweets to show them. But as the controversy over that feature shows, the Twitter chronological-order model is at the core of what the service offers for many users — and a number of them have specifically said it is the thing they like most about Twitter when compared to Facebook.
The most recent example of how stark the differences can be between a filtered feed and an unfiltered one was the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. and how that showed up so dramatically on Twitter but was barely present for most users of Facebook. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted, that kind of filtering has social consequences — and journalism professor Emily Bell pointed out that doing this makes Facebook and Twitter into information gatekeepers in much the same way newspapers used to be.
The impetus for Twitter to filter is obvious: the service needs to show growth in both number of users and engagement in order to satisfy investors, and finding relevant content as a new user can be a challenge, which is why the company recently updated its so-called “on-boarding” process.
The reverse-chronological feed has already been tampered with by features like Twitter’s conversation threading, which connects responses in an attempt to show users an entire discussion — another feature that some users love and others hate. But moving to a totally filtered “relevance” approach would be a much more significant move, even if Twitter provided an opt-out or allowed users to turn it off. And it could change the nature of the service dramatically
Twitter can't be this stupid can they?
http://gigaom.com/2014/09/04/twitter-cfo-says-a-facebook-style-filtered-feed-is-coming-whether-you-like-it-or-not/
