Twitter should roll out a tab highlighting the best tweets, similar to “While You Were Away”, and should have realized how awful the new “Explore” tab is
M.G. Siegler / 500ish Words :
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter spent late 2016 converging on a single answer to discovery: after testing an Explore tab in place of Moments on mobile apps, it confirmed in January it was replacing Moments with Explore, built around trending topics and news. M.G. Siegler's critique lands three days later, arguing the company picked the wrong surface — what users want surfaced is the best tweets, not the loudest topics.
His proposed fix isn't new machinery: Twitter had already expanded "While You Were Away" into a full algorithmic timeline back in February 2016, so a best-of tab would be a recombination of existing ranking work rather than a build-from-scratch feature. The piece matters because it captures the recurring tension in Twitter's product strategy between topic-level aggregation and tweet-level curation.
First-order effects
- Users opening the app now find Moments gone and trending topics promoted in its place, while Siegler's argument puts pressure on Twitter's product team to justify Explore over a ranked-best-tweets alternative it already has the infrastructure to ship.
Second-order effects
- The redesign continues shifting Twitter's home screen toward algorithmically chosen content, deepening the dependence of reach on Twitter's ranking choices rather than user navigation — a dependency that later showed up again when X began removing preview headlines from article links, further narrowing how outside content gets surfaced.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter's discovery surfaces consolidate under algorithmic control one redesign at a time — timeline, then tabs — leaving publishers and creators increasingly subject to whatever the ranking layer decides to emphasize.
The trend: Consumer social platforms keep swapping user-controlled navigation for algorithmically ranked surfaces, and each tab-level redesign like Explore is another step in that trade.