Stop Twitter Feed Automatically Refreshing

Published: 2021-07-18
Author: Disabled World | Contact: Disabled World (Disabled-World.com)
Peer-Reviewed Publication: N/A
Additional References: Library of Electronics/Software Publications

Synopsis: Here is how you can stop the annoying way your Twitter timeline feed keeps auto refreshing and jumping around before you have finished reading Tweets. Any time there is a substantial number of new tweets, your feed refreshes automatically, and scrolls all the way up. It doesn't care if you’re reading anything. It just scrolls up and you lose your place in your feed. Presumably, the auto-refresh is meant to happen seamlessly by "quietly" inserting tweets at the top of your timeline. Instead, it appears to happen at random, interrupting users who just want to catch up on the current tweets in their timeline.

Main Digest

You know how on Twitter when you scroll down near the bottom of the page and then it decides to automatically load more tweets (endless scroll). Well, a lot of times - all of a sudden - the whole timeline will refresh automatically and go back to the top, and then eventually jump back to somewhere close to where you were.

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While auto-refresh is a good feature in theory, and definitely has its uses for live event Tweets etc., the current implementation causes the refresh to happen at some very inconvenient times, like right in the middle of reading a tweet. The timeline zooms back up to the top and the user loses track of what they were reading.

If you find the way your Twitter feed keeps auto scrolling and/or loading new Tweets before you have finished reading the ones you were interested in causing you to lose your place in your Twitter timeline then here's how to fix it for both Twitter Desktop and Twitter Mobile.

Stop Twitter Auto Refreshing

Tap your avatar in the top right (on the mobile app) or click "More" on the left hand side of Twitter on desktop computers.

Click on "Settings and Privacy".
Click on "Accessibility".
Toggle "Reduce Motion" to the on position.

So, to stop your Twitter feed from constantly auto refreshing; Locate the "Reduce motion" option under the "Motion" section in the "Accessibility" area of your profile settings. Uncheck the checkbox to disable the auto scrolling feature. You will still see the Twitter notification that tells you there are new Tweets at the top to read but, this should, but might not always, stop Twitter from autoscrolling your feed.

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