Here’s How To See Your Tweets In Order

The year is 2016. You’re cradling your phone first thing in the morning, reading through your chronological Twitter timeline to catch up on everything you missed last night when you fell asleep on the couch while watching Scandal. Only, your feed has tweets from all over the place, and it’s littered with #RIPTwitter hashtags. People are angrily tweeting about an update that would say goodbye to orderly, chronological tweets and put an algorithm in charge of what you see and when.

This was the reality for Twitter users between 2016 and 2018, and the lingering impact of not being able to see Tweets in order is still felt today. Back then, your Twitter timeline was sorted by Top Tweets, which prioritized tweets that the app thought you’d engage with based on the way you’ve previously engaged with content. Of course, that can also make your timeline more polarizing — only showing the stuff you love or the stuff you hate-read. Per Twitter’s Help page, the algorithm also included viral tweets in the spirit of trying to show you content that you might be curious about.

Then in 2018, after much complaining, Twitter re-rolled out the option to make tweets chronological in your timeline, so you could see the latest tweets instead of just the top tweets first. This made people very happy: The change meant no more blocks of “in case you missed it” tweets from 19 hours ago, or tweets your friends liked popping up in your feed. Just the sweet, sweet endless scroll of tweets from the accounts you’ve chosen follow.

According to Twitter, people like having agency over how their timeline is presented to them. The ability to opt for chronological tweets as a default was clutch, especially when it comes to checking for updates on sports games, news events, or TV shows — hello spoiler, alerts. Still, on March 10, Twitter announced that they would be changing the functionality of the timeline once again. Instead of having the latest tweets as your default home page, top tweets were the default, and latest tweets were moved to their own tab. In this update, people would have the option toggle between the two timelines. But once the change came out, users were not shy about letting the app know that they were not down with the update.

On March 14, Twitter announced they would revert the update, which had been rolled out for the iOS app only. “We heard you,” the company shared in a Tweet. “Some of you always want to see latest Tweets first. We've switched the timeline back and removed the tabbed experience for now while we explore other options.”

How To See Tweets In Chronological Order

You can choose how you want to view your timeline by updating your settings so it’s always set to your preference. To change your timeline algorithm, tap the sparkle icon on the upper right corner. If you’re currently in Latest Tweets mode, you’ll see “Switch to Home,” which will make your timeline a collection of recommended tweets that are not in chronological order. If you’re currently in Home mode, you’ll see the option to “Switch to Latest Tweets,” which will show you tweets from your followers only, as they’re posted in real time. Though you can change your preferences at any time, once you pick a setting, your feed will always default load this way. You can make these changes in both the browser version of Twitter or in your mobile app.

If you’re still seeing Home and Latest in different tabs, try refreshing or updating the app to make sure you’re using the latest version.