For me, the "while you were away" feature shows me things I don't care about. I do indicate so by clicking the "X" to train their engine - but it hasn't shown me anything worth caring about.
For example, I really care about funny cats. My timeline is 85% cats, and I retweet funny cat pictures 65% of the time. However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-workers are doing and saying, etc - Yah - it's in my feed, but I literally don't care. I spend 8 hours a day with my co-workers and hear all their tweets first hand. All I want are fun cat pictures from places that I haven't seen before to make the day easier to pass and to ward off depression... and it'd be great if twitter can make me a cat picture search engine. But for now they haven't done that for me yet.
Maybe they can allow a user to curate the "while you are away" algorithm so I can have a core set of twitter accounts that I really want to keep track of while I'm away ( https://twitter.com/cuteemergency and https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens ) and/or weigh explicitly which accounts I want to train my personal preference algorithms ... It would be pretty easy too since the lists feature already exists - just make it so the algorithm only pulls from an indicated list.
Until such a function exists I think i'll keep it off and just enjoy the cats.
Anecdotal, but I can see how this feature might or might not hit the target. All I can say is I hope they keep it an option that can be disabled or enabled and they don't take away the option box for this.
> However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-workers are doing and saying, etc - Yah - it's in my feed, but I literally don't care. I spend 8 hours a day with my co-workers and hear all their tweets first hand.
Mute them on Twitter if the unfollowing isn't socially acceptable?
I don't want to mute them because I follow their tweets and timelines! I wouldn't hesitate to block/ban if I didn't find them interesting.
I just don't need to be reminded about what they did "while I'm away" - by definition when I'm away from Twitter I'm most likely working and talking to them directly! And often I helped them write/make/instigate the tweet that is getting so much traffic that twitter emerges it as "something hot" from their account.
I get that I want to follow them and don't want to mute them - just that the feature is extraneous for some types of tweets (and some classes of twitter accounts) - for example, if I follow a stock tweet - one that tweets pricing alerts for example, I don't need to know 10+ hours later "what important things they are up to" because by definition, that stock tweet is no longer valid (trading day is only the length of the working day).
And even if I wanted historical updates, I can just go back to their timeline and/or do a search on the stock exchange symbol.
Like I said, if they allowed users to filter out or filter in - or use the List feature - which a large % of twitter users know about and use, it'd be more useful.
But how do you know with any certainty that it is showing you all the things you drfinitely care about? I find it only highlights one in every ten tweets I care about, so I still need to scroll through and read everything because it has missed so much.
