Twitter is testing an “Explore” tab in place of “Moments” on its mobile apps, highlighting news, trending topics, and more
Twitter may be getting ready to make some big changes to its app. — The company is now testing a change that replaces the Moments tab …
Context & Ripple Effects
Moments was Twitter's bet on hand-curated story bundles, and by late 2016 the company is quietly testing its replacement: an Explore tab built around news and trending topics rather than editorial curation. The test proved durable — Twitter confirmed in January 2017 that it would replace Moments with an Explore tab outright.
What followed reads as a slow rebuild of the same surface: Explore gained topic-based sections like News, Sports, and Entertainment on iOS in 2018 (sorting stories into topics), the 2019 web redesign gave trends their own revised section, and by December 2021 Twitter was testing an algorithmic, TikTok-style For You feed inside Explore. This 2016 test is the origin point of that arc.
First-order effects
- Mobile users lose the Moments tab's curated-story view and gain a discovery surface keyed to trending topics and live news, shifting how they encounter content beyond their follow graph.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and media brands that optimized for Moments placement have to chase trending-topic visibility instead, while Twitter positions Explore as the answer to rivals' discovery feeds — the same pattern TechCrunch later noted at Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit with their own feed experiments.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter's navigation consolidates around one algorithmically ranked discovery surface — culminating in the For You/Trending split tested in 2021 — trading human curation for engagement-ranked recommendation as the default way users find non-followed content.
The trend: Social platforms are steadily replacing editorially curated surfaces with algorithmic interest feeds, and Twitter's Explore tab is an early, multi-year instance of that migration.