One trouble when you become a public traded company is that, instead of focusing on updating your service to be helpful to your users, you start to do things to increase revenue and distance your core users. Twitter is no exemption from this and their latest update is an example of how to ruin user experience.

Today, Twitter announced a new update to its iPhone app, which will show users you want to follow on your main timeline. In Twitter’s words, the update “will make it easier for users to track down new people to follow”.

After this update, this is how your iPhone screen will look.

https://twitter.com/twitter/status/639913479759990788

As you can see, if you launch the app, instead of showing tweets from the people you follow in your timeline, Twitter will show a list of users you don’t even care before showing your actual timeline.

It is not that you cannot discover people in the previous version of the app. You can always use the discover option, by tapping a button in the upper-left corner, to see this list and discover more people to follow.

Anyone can see it is Twitter’s way to push “Promoted Accounts as suggestions” to users. In fact, Twitter has stated the same in their support page, which you can find here.

We are not against making money, it is the main reason for running a commercial company like Twitter, but what we ask is, do it without causing inconvenience to users and ruin their experience.

By going through the tweets the update received, it seems a lot of people hate this update too.