Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides and advice on how to easily get the most out of your devices, apps and stuff.
In 2019, Twitter introduced a feature called Topics to bring you tweets related to your areas of interest without having to follow more people.
On paper, it’s a great idea to keep the same basic timeline while still getting updates about topics that might interest you. But it’s a bit tricky to manage your feed so you don’t get overwhelmed by all those suggested tweets.
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Don’t worry, I got you. In this guide, I will walk you through all the steps to eliminate unwanted threads. Plus, I’m going to talk about this hidden setting called Interests that you might not know about.
But first, let’s go through the basics.
Browsing Topics
In your current timeline, Twitter will show you tweets based on the topics you’ve been following, along with tweets from people you’re following.
From time to time, he may also send tweets related to topics in which you may be interested.
You can see what an example of a tweet related to the topic looks like in the screenshot below:
If you click on a topic title, you’ll see all the tweets related to it. The caveat is that it’s a Twitter-curated list and there’s no way to rank it. Bummer.
The following threads are useful for getting updates about a topic without following a ton of new accounts. I like to use it to find interesting facts or learn about a new industry – like web3 and blockchain – that I can report on.
Topic Management
To follow a topic, when a tweet with a topic tag appears in your timeline, click on look moreand then it hit Follow the button.
If you want to see which topics you follow and filter the list, here’s how you can do it:
- go to Settings > Privacy & Security
- Click on The content you see
- Select threads
- You will see a list of what you already follow. You can unfollow any of them if you don’t want to see tweets related to that topic.
- IN Suggested section, you can explore more topics you want to follow.
This brings us to the third part: Not interested, which is complicated. Topics will only appear in this section when you see a topic in your timeline and click the X button to indicate you are not interested. Alternatively, you can click on the three-dot menu and then select Not interested.
You can go back and follow that thread through the settings mentioned above if you accidentally ignore it.
This is a bit confusing because you can’t move a topic from Following to Not interested. You can only do it when you’ve unfollowed and a tweet about it appears in your timeline.
In particular, there is a difference between unfollowing a topic and moving it to Not interested section. With the former, you may still see some tweets related to the topic, with the latter, you won’t see any of them. And you thought understanding NFTs is hard.
What about ‘Interests’?
When you visit the content settings menu mentioned above, you’ll also see a interests tab next to Topics.
It’s an automatically curated list of things Twitter thinks you’re interested in. The company said this is to personalize your experience on the bird page to show you “suggested topics and recommended Tweets”. Plus, the company uses this list to show you targeted ads.
You can deselect topics that are irrelevant to you. But since this is an automatically generated list, you should check it periodically and pick out any odd interests. This is bad and Twitter doesn’t make it easy.
It’s worth visiting this list once every six months, but it’s not an essential environment to worry about. Don’t let the algorithm win.
Make things simpler, please
Despite being out for over two years, Topics feels like a beta feature. There is so much complexity involved, and it doesn’t even correctly identify cats and dogs.
Threads are useful for showing you tweets outside of the regular timeline that you might be interested in. But if you think this is making your feed more cluttered, you can spend some time tweaking your settings. I really wish the company would create a dedicated Themes tab so it’s easier to manage them.