Twitter has killed off the Discover feature in favor of highlights

As the name suggests, the Discover tool was how Twitter users have been able to discover the best content on the platform for quite some time, but now the company has decided to retire the feature in favor of something a bit more inline with its current vision. The new feature will automatically highlight trending topics and provide a brief description of the topic to explain what it means. 

Twitter wants users to discover the best content. On Wednesday, the company said the namesake tool built to do just that is being retired. In its place, the company is rolling out a new feature for its mobile app that highlights trending topics, part of Twitter’s ongoing effort to help users find timely and interesting tweets. Going forward, trending topics — often in the form of hashtags — will appear on the app’s search page with brief descriptions appearing under each one to explain the meaning. That can be helpful as some hashtags are obscure. The new feature is similar to how Facebook includes a one-line description below trending items listed next to the news feed on the desktop version. Twitter said it may also show how many tweets have been sent related to each trend and whether it is gaining or losing traction. The new mobile trends feature is launching in the U.S. in English for iOS and Android. The company says it is continuing to experiment with similar features for Twitter.com.