Twitter just quietly killed this longtime feature

Say it ain’t so, TweetGods! MagicRecs has retired, and it didn’t even tweet a goodbye!

“@MagicRecs is no longer regularly sending recommendations through Direct Message. Recommendations that were previously shared via Direct Message are now delivered via push notification,” a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Tech Crunch this week.

For those unfamiliar with the Bot account, Twitter launched MagicRecs in 2013, and it functioned pretty much according to its name. If you followed the account, it would send you DMs (direct messages) recommending viral accounts or Tweets to follow, based off an algorithm that measured how many others you knew were following an account or Tweet.

MagicRecs was fairly successful in its nearly three-year lifespan. The account had over 112,000 followers and was considered to make reliably accurate recommendations. However, you had to follow the account in order to receive the recommendations. This is the key difference between MagicRecs and DMs that send push notifications. By default in iOS, push notifications are turned on, and therefore reach more people. You can opt out, but MagicRecs gave you the unique ability to take it or leave it as you desired, since the recommendations only came if you followed them directly.

In Twitter’s Q1 earnings released this week, the reports revealed that the social media conglomerate is struggling to attract more users. Usership isn’t expanding, therefore it makes the most sense for the company to exclusively use a recommendation tool that is automatically enabled on most phones. And in a not so surprising fact to come from this week’s reports, 83% of Twitter usage is done on mobile.

MagicRecs wasn’t the first DM-based Twitter account, but it was largely considered the most accurate. But this is the dawning of the age of immediacy, and MagicRecs, it turns out, just wasn’t magical enough.