I simply don't have the time or the interest to keep up with a long stream of tweets. It allows me to catch some highlights, and then move on to the never ending live stream.
This hasn't been twitter's objective for a long time now. The idea that twitter caters or cares about power users (in my opinion) was put to rest when they decided to severely limit apis and third party tooling years ago.
As a company, they want to be as big as possible which means power users are not their target audience.
The problem with Applying it to Twitter is that they have never been as big or universal as people assume they are. The median number of tweets from an account is one, active in-stream users lagged freaking Google+ for years, etc. Their shoddy, unintuitive product is practically designed to be power-user heavy, and the network has been so since the beginning. Having a user base thick with big influencers like journalists, celebs, and politicians is a blessing, but Twitter couldn't understand that and blindly followed Facebook's playbook, despite being a hugely different company.
Perhaps a non-curated Twitter is bad for business? Twitter and the 'Brands' benefit when the ads show up first, and not below the fold, win-win, right?. I suspect curated Twitter has higher engagement as well, so why keep the other option?
It might seem unintrusive to you because it doesn't interupt your Twitter workflow, it is definitely intrusive to me and is not a "small design change".
I carefully curate the people I follow, roughly for any given day, I can read the tweets in my timeline written on that day - all of them. When twitter's algorithm "surfaces" certain tweets, it removes them from the regular timeline, so if I dismiss their seemingly randomly selected "While you were away", I wont ever see them again! How brain-damaged is this?
The change works fine for people who have more tweets in their timeline than they can read - which is fine if you trust Twitters algorithm to select the ones you find interesting, and I do not. This is the same bullshit that Facebook does with the very stubborn "Top Posts" ordering
I have the exact same issue; I follow less than thirty accounts, and I want to read everything from all of them. When I tried dismissing the "While you were away...", I was missing many tweets, so I was forced to turn it back on.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...
twitter.com##has-recap
1. The one you're talking about, messes up the chronological order of the timeline completely. That one is called "Show me the best Tweets first", in settings, and I have disabled it. Some people report Twitter flips the switch whenever they see fit, but that has never happened to me.
2. The second one is a small widget that appears at the top of your timeline that says "while you were away" and shows three tweets. There is no way to disable this. This is what it looks like on a desktop: http://i.imgur.com/R6rPRGo.jpg There are similar ones for mobile. I don't personally care too much about it (I close it... just one of hundreds of annoyances I have to put up with when I use a computer) but there's a huge problem: those three tweets are removed from your timeline, wherever they were. So they mess my timeline up (someone might have tweeted two things in rapid succession, and one of the tweets goes missing because they move it up to that widget). And there is no way to disable this, at all.
It's baffling bad.
That's their core product there and it's broken. And they don't care. I miss the twicca days... That's the Twitter I liked, a chronological stream of text. I mourn for it.
I cannot imagine what Twitter is spending its time doing.
It now feels much less overrun by marketers. Real interesting discussion is once more possible. Just like the old days.
The endeavor that drove me, a passionate user for several years, off the site for good. It's sad that they watered themselves down to become a second-place Facebook.
Maybe it's not even their fault, and it's just a side effect of being a public company and being measured by growth instead of by the uniqueness and quality of the product. It's still sad.
When the dust settles, there will be lesson in the danger of engagement-metric based product design. Twitter has a "while you were away" feature that shows you their idea of the tweets they'd like you to see first. (Even if you return to the site 5 minutes after your last session.) (This is different from the non-chronological timeline, and doesn't get turned off when you disable that.)
When you dismiss it, it asks you if you'd like to see less of that. It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline. A lot of users have been vocal about hating the feature. By dismissing it are they actually burying certain friends down further on their timeline? Who knows? Some people are guessing correctly what the meaning is, but others aren't. They're feeding a certain amount of garbage input into their algorithms.