Twitter experiments with new 'Suggested Follows' lists on Android and it is a confusing venture

In 2015, Twitter’s CFO stated that the platform was struggling to grow as new users found it intimidating and difficult to find topics they liked and had a hard time in establishing an online presence. He also said that in simple words Twitter was just too hard to use. This is a big hindrance to the growth of an online platform and Twitter has been affected by it. Since then Twitter’s main goal has been making the platform more user-friendly and intuitive for new users and make it easier for them to find topics that they are interested in.

It has made major and minor changes that made it easier for new users to find and connect with more people with the same interests or views. It has made it easier for users to be able to establish an online presence and made it easier for them to talk on issues and topics that they care about. Rather, than having to manually explore tweets, hashtags, accounts, celebrities, etc. Twitter’s updated algorithms infer what the user is interested in based on how they interact with the majority of tweets on their feed. If they are liking, commenting, or retweeting tweets with a certain topic or certain hashtag more posts that are related to that particular topic will be shown to them.

All of these changes make sense and they were well-applauded by the Twitter community and it showed its success with Twitter increasing in popularity over time and the fact that Twitter has shown great potential and great understanding of the mindsets of new users and then showed that they have the imagination to create changes based on their findings and then show the skill to execute those changes in an amazing manner raises the bar and it leaves most website experts and long-time users confounded when they come up with something like their new ‘Suggested Follows’ listings.

'Suggested Follows' shows up when you follow an account and it has a list of 20 accounts that are similar to the one you just followed and you have to follow all of them at once and then unfollow those you don’t like. This is such a labor-intensive process, having to manually unfollow accounts that you were not interested in following in the first place. This just seems like another way to increase useless clutter on your feed.

Twitter should have paid more thought to this feature and tried to view what the users would dislike or be annoyed by. If the users had an option to be able to follow only the accounts that they want to from that list, this would be an actual improvement and a good way to increase the chances of users finding topics or people they are interested in hearing more from.

Read next: Twitter is working on new functionality for its ‘Hide Replies’ feature to prevent people from engaging with negative comments
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