How to stop Twitter feeds automatically refreshing
The Twitter apps have started doing something new, something annoying. 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. The good news is, you can change one little setting and stop Twitter feeds automatically refreshing.
Stop Twitter feeds automatically refreshing
Open Twitter and tap your profile icon at the top left. In the navigation drawer that opens, tap ‘Settings and Privacy’. On the Settings and Privacy screen, tap ‘Accessibility’.
On the Accessibility screen, look for and turn On the ‘Reduce Motion’ option. That will do the job. The next time your Twitter feed has new tweets, regardless of how many there are, your feed will not refresh.
You will still see the little notification in the app that tells you some of the more popular accounts that you followed have tweeted something but, the feed won’t scroll up.
It’s not clear if this is a new feature, or if Twitter just decided to enable it by default after an update. The in-app notification has been a part of the Twitter apps for a long time. When a user tapped this notification, the feed scrolled to the top. The scrolling was an action that had to be initiated by the user. Now, it’s doing it on its own which makes for a poor browsing experience.
Turning this option off will have small side-effects. Twitter can show you live engagement stats e.g., if you’re reading a Tweet that has a certain number of retweets, and is actively getting more retweets, the number under the Tweet card will update. Turning ‘Reduce Motion’ off will disable this live count as it’s a part of the animations that the app has.
Automatically refreshing a feed, regardless of what the platform is, is never a good idea. Facebook does this and it is one of the more annoying aspects of the social network. When a feed refreshes on Facebook, it’s almost impossible to find something again because the feed itself is curated and generated by Facebook. You are not getting a chronological view of all updates. It’s the same for Twitter. By default, Twitter apps show you popular tweets unless you switch over to the chronological view. It is still possible to find your place again in your feed but that may not always hold true if you follow a lot of accounts.
Doesn’t work. I hate Twitter on my phone, takes forever because I have to start all over again after every reply. Doesn’t happen on my pc.
This may work on laptops but doesn’t seem to work on devices like iPad. (App issue at Twitter’s end?)
Very aggravating. I have a limit of 3 auto-refreshes and then I quit Twitter. Wonder if this is really what they want. As you say, why is this ever a good idea? I can and do refresh my own damn feed when I want to.
thank you this started all of a sudden and was driving me crazy
In the latest iOS version (20210811) this is worse than ever. Switching on ‘reduce motion’ does not help.
Useless. Turning this on does not stop the screen from refreshing. It still refreshes just as it did before.
The reduce motion doesn’t work even if you toggle it on. Both on Edge and Chrome my twitter feed jumps all over the place and nothing can stop it. Twitter is basically broken.
Didn’t work for me, either. I so hoped it would, as this issue drives me CRAZY!
nope, does not work. This is not happening on my news feed but when I’m reading certain threads. There’s nothing “new” forcing the thread upwards, it’s just random threads yes, others no, super irritating, and changing accessibility to reduced motion changed nothing.
Same here. I’ve tried it several times on PC and it still randomly refreshes while I’m in the middle of reading a tweet. This should not be so hard.
While I applaud your efforts, this doesn’t work on my phone.
Hello,
I am desperate to find a fix for my Twitter issue but I seem to be using the wrong words to describe it because I can’t find anyone with a similar issue except for this one Imgur video where nobody had a solution. Basically I’ll be looking at a popular hashtag and under the “Latest Tweets”, they will disappear and reappear and skip and jump all over the page, and also when I go to click on one, it will be gone from that location and moved somewhere else on the page, sometimes completely out of view. It is different from the description you used above because it DOES NOT “go all the way to the top” it just moves around and jumps and skips all over the place. Is there an addon to fix this? Thanks.
Please note: I DO NOT HAVE AN ACCOUNT and I DO NOT WANT ONE, so similar suggestions to yours to change account settings WILL NOT WORK.
The &%$#ing twitter app started jumping to top of the TL after an update or two ago. I’m gonna try this method but I am not optimistic.
ive had the reduce motion option on and off but twitter still refreshes my feed when i open the app. is there any new instructions?
Doesn’t work. I found this tip weeks ago and Twitter still keeps jerking my screen around.
This doesn’t work, at least not for me. Any fall back position?
This doesn’t work. Possibly changed from when it came out.
Doesn’t work. I did this a couple of days ago (I view Twitter on my desktop) and my feed still auto-refreshes.
Doesn’t work on a W10 laptop. Is this only for the mobile app? Twitter has become virtually unusable now with the continual scrolling.
Unbelievable that even one person within Twitter was dumb enough to think anyone would want scrolling. Beyond astounding they managed to find people that agreed with them and then rolled it out as well as forcing the enlarged version of the mobile app onto desktop users.
Thanks! I was reallt plagued with this annoying autorefresh for a long time! I even thought it was a bug…
Unfortunately it still does. Hated FB for that feature🤦♂️
Wish this would work on Desktop. But mine’s already unchecked.
Thank you.
hi! I have done this, but twitter still auto-refreshes for me – do y’all have any updated instructions?
mine still auto advances
“On the Accessibility screen, look for and turn off the ‘Reduce Motion’ option.”
This is exactly OPPOSITE of what you should do. You need to toggle the ‘Reduce Motion’ option ON !!!
Please correct your article.
Thank you. The article has been updated