The most annoying thing about X is, well, X – but the company has at least fixed an app behavior many of us found frustrating.
Just 18 years after users started complaining about it, X’s head of product said that a fix is now rolling out …
That irritation? You’ve just started reading something at the top of your feed, and then the feed spontaneously reloads and it is lost forever.
Entrepreneur and investor Jesse Pujji repeated the complaint a few days ago, and product lead Nikita Bier says it has now been fixed, claiming that it was a “bug” rather than a deliberate choice by the company.
Auto-refreshing feeds are something many social networks have done, as they believe that continually pushing new content is good for engagement. However, it has gradually dawned on some that irritating your users is not.
Top comment by Raman
They lost me forever when they banned third party apps. I still miss Tweetbot. No ads. Linear timeline with no glitches. No ads (did I mention that?).
Instagram reached this conclusion last year, acknowledging that it’s really annoying for users, even if it does cost them some engagement metrics.
We’ve stopped doing something we call rug-pull. So we’ve all had that moment where you open up Instagram and you’re looking at something, and then all of a sudden new content comes in, and it moves, and it’s really annoying. We do that, or we did that, because we were trying to load content and it was taking a while. So we showed you something that it was already downloaded in the meantime, and it generally was good for engagement. That said, it’s really annoying, so we stopped doing that.
The X update is in the process of rolling out. It hasn’t yet shown up for me, so I can’t confirm whether the content remains in place until you manually refresh.
Don’t get too comfortable with the new behaviour, however. If the company does see that it reduces engagement, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the change reversed.
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