Why we are going to kill Twine's feed

Twine is our campus app, live at three universities. Its feed is coming off the front door. When you open Twine, you will land on your schedule instead: your classes, your deadlines and your next test, with an alert before each one.

Why the feed loses. A feed has one job, which is to hold your attention, and it is fighting Instagram for the same minutes. It also only works once a whole campus is posting at the same time. We will not win that fight, so we are leaving it.

What a tool does instead. A schedule is useful to one student on day one, even if none of their friends have the app. It tells you your class starts in 30 minutes. It reminds you a day or two before a test. It keeps reminding you about an assignment until you mark it done. In a class circle, one person sets the schedule (the course rep, a club lead, a study lead) and everyone in the circle gets it. Anyone in the circle can add a deadline, so it never goes stale.

What happens to posting. Posting doesn't go away. It becomes the Board: a bulletin board, not a place to say random stuff. Real names, no anonymous posts, no categories to pick first. You choose who sees it: the whole campus, or one of your circles. School and Twine updates arrive as messages, not posts.

The pushback. The team didn't all agree, and they changed the plan. One of our content leads said removing the feed would hurt more than help, but it shouldn't be the focus. Our head of content said keep it, just don't open the app on it, and called it a board for reaching people outside your circles. Someone else said a board nobody checks is dead, and a board that alerts you is alive. So we are killing the feed as the front door, not what people post. Posts move into the Board, and every part of the app sends alerts.

The bet. Tools in small, specific places beat apps that fight for attention. Students will open Twine because something is due, not because they are bored.

What happens next. When the rebuild ships, I'll write a short follow up on whether the bet worked, whatever it shows.