All I want is a timeline that respects my time

I had an interview recently with a social media platform (not Twitter—if I ever get that desperate I’ll just give up on design entirely), and at one point I was asked what I would change about their product. The answer I gave was not good, which of course led me to spend the next several days replaying the conversation in my head and ruminating on a better answer.

In the meantime, I heard back that I did not make it onto the next round of interviews. (Which is fine. I am literally just some guy, and I’m sure they had plenty of much more qualified candidates.) But, since I will not be the next product designer at said platform, I figured I might as well release my idea to the wild in the hopes that someone likes it enough to build it.

The thing I would most like from all social media platforms (in particular the text-based ones I tend to spend more time on) is a timeline that respects my time.

I despise the endless algorithmic feeds that have become the default across the social media landscape. I fully recognize that the reason they exist is to maximize advertising revenue, and that anything that eats into that revenue is going to be a non-starter for most platforms. But I think users deserve better. I obviously can’t predict the future, but I hope and believe that this era of algorithms will prove to be a phase, and that users will eventually revolt in an effort to regain their time.

I also fully recognize that some folks probably love algorithmic feeds. They’ve clearly gotten very good at serving us what we want to see. But I think that users likely exist on a spectrum from those totally content to let the algorithm serve them whatever it deems worthy, and people like me who would rather experience social media like RSS or inbox zero: something that you control the content of, that you can quickly catch up on and then not think about for a bit.

My current favorite way to experience social media is the model pioneered by Tweetbot and currently used by Ivory and Reeder. In those apps, when you refresh the timeline, the last post you read stays at the top of the screen, new posts are loaded in chronological order above it, and you scroll up until you’re caught up. Your timeline position is also synced across devices.

This is as opposed to Bluesky, Twitter, and others, where a refresh always scrolls you to the latest post, and you then scroll down until eventually reaching the last thing you read.

What’s nice about the Tweetbot model is:

• You experience posts in the order they happened.

• You reach a very clear endpoint.

• There’s very little temptation to continually refresh because you just… get to the end. You never get lost scrolling down through things you’ve already read.

If it were up to me, the Tweetbot model would be the default behavior everywhere. I know that’s probably not realistic for platforms trying to maximize ad revenue, but I still think they could at least offer it as an option. I don’t think my only choices should be “feel dirty every time I use your platform” or “avoid your platform entirely.” Platforms should offer us a middle ground (if not by default, then at least as an option for those of us brave enough to dig into the settings).

For some of the newer federated platforms, however, I think this could be a totally reasonable default, provided we can solve for this approach’s one big pain point, which is what happens when you come back from some time away to a mountain of unread posts.

Thankfully, I don’t think that’d be too difficult to solve. At the point you refresh, if the number of unread posts exceeds a certain threshold, you could be offered a choice of paths: load all unread posts, or load only the highlights. With a bit of preloading, I think the paths could even be built into the pull-to-refresh gesture.

Highlights would include popular posts, as well as posts from your mutuals. Estimated reading times could help you make an informed decision about which path to take.

Once you get to the end of the highlights, another refresh would load all posts, and if you wanted to scroll back down chronologically, you could. If you made it back to where you started, you’d see a break in the posts and a callout telling you you’re all caught up. And if the you’re either all caught up or the highlight path isn’t available, pull-to-refresh would behave as it usually does.

There are obviously a lot of finer details to figure out with the pull-to-refresh interaction and the quantity and recency thresholds that would result in the highlight path becoming available, but I’m pretty sure this is how I’d like to experience all social media, if given the option.