Twitter is going to force everyone who uses TweetDeck to switch over to the “new” version to help mitigate some of the issues TweetDeck has been experiencing lately. I used quotes around “new” because the experience has been in preview for nearly two years, but according to a Twitter employee, “recent changes” have broken the legacy version of the app and will mean that the company will migrate everyone to the updated experience.

Twitter employees have also shared some slight clarifications about what’s going on with TweetDeck at the moment. For many on the old interface, TweetDeck is largely useless right now; all of my columns are just spinning with a “Loading…” message, and my colleagues saw something similar as well.

While the empty columns popped up after Twitter began rate-limiting tweets, according to the Twitter employees, those rate limits aren’t actually causing the problems with old TweetDeck. Instead, the employees claim that the issues are because of Twitter removing legacy APIs to prevent data scraping.

The work to force the switch will begin “this week,” that employee said, and in replies, people are imploring that Twitter “please don’t.” I can’t blame them — I remember not liking the TweetDeck Preview when I tried it out in 2021, and neither did my colleague Sean Hollister. I’m don’t know how much the preview may have changed since then, and I hope Twitter has improved it for the better, but I’m not optimistic; Twitter’s TweetDeck account hasn’t said a word since August.

When reached for comment, Twitter’s press email auto-replied with a poop emoji, as it as been doing since March.