The temporary follow feature in Twitter Moments is indispensable when big news hits, but too hard to find
Two major news events unfolded this week with the kind of incremental and quickly evolving updates that made Twitter an ideal place to follow both.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Twitter launched Moments as Project Lightning in October 2015, the pitch was event-based curation of tweets, videos, and images — and analysts immediately framed it as Twitter reinventing the newspaper. A year on, BuzzFeed's verdict is narrower: the product works when big news hits, because incremental, fast-moving updates are exactly what Twitter is built for, but the temporary follow feature that captures those updates sits too deep in the interface for most users to find.
That discovery gap matters because BuzzFeed's own coverage shows Twitter and Facebook playing complementary roles during breaking news — Twitter supplies the live increment, Facebook the aftermath. If the follow feature stays hidden, Twitter forfeits its half of that pairing at precisely the moments it wins.
First-order effects
- Users tracking a major breaking-news event can't easily activate the temporary follow, so Twitter's editorially curated Moments reach fewer people than the content quality justifies.
Second-order effects
- The discoverability problem pushes Twitter to keep rebuilding event-following closer to the main timeline — first with Happening Now grouping tweets by events, then with algorithmically curated timelines promoted atop the feed for big news.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, event curation migrates from a standalone Moments tab into algorithmic surfaces inside the timeline itself, culminating in the followable topics direction — a structural shift from reverse-chronological feed toward the newspaper model Moments was meant to be.
The trend: Twitter keeps relocating event-based curation from hidden standalone features like Moments into the main timeline, edging the product from a raw feed toward an algorithmically assembled newspaper.