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The Feed Is Dying

nymag.com

51–60 of 96 posts

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#51
This is get for having psych majors optimize the feed for an optimal mix of reward/stale to achieve maximum addictivity. Skinner box, now available in Facebook

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#52
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $1000 and $30 a month, anybody in the world could hire someone to setup and maintain a personal email server. Of course being user owned, by definition users should be allowed to outsource their email service to large companies, and they do, because it's a lot cheaper that way. But an email server they own themselves, with their own rules, own display preferences, compatible with billions of other email accounts,…

Nobody is arguing that you can't set up your own system. You can build your own version of fb/twt etc... if you wanted. The distinction is that 99.9% of consumers and an increasing number of organizations don't want to do it in house and would rather let someone else do it. Again, it's not about capability, it's about what people actually are doing.

>> You can build your own version of fb/twt etc.

You couldn't build your own version of fb that can view posts from your friends.

You can setup your own email service to view emails from your friends who are using @gmail.

That's an important distinction.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#53
This is not news. We feeble humans cannot continue to drink from the ever-growing reverse-chronological firehose. Algorithms will only get better. Progress marches on.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't be replaced but it can be made easily mutable. For example, imagine a quick-switcher that flips the feed from algorithmic to time based with a single tap. That's a powerful feature and adapts twitter to different use-cases fast. I think the key here is to give users options instead of trying to shepard them into a particular direction, especially with their bipolar userbase (e.g. people use Twitter for vario…

But making the algorithmic feed the default, alone, is enough to kill the platform. For the mere fact of nudging, and human laziness. It will just make the shit rise to the top, instead of the hidden gems that make Twitter golden. Twitter has to be one of the most poorly run tech companies, outside of Yahoo. They changed their API token limits, and destroyed 3rd party clients. They bought TweetDeck and then utterly d…

Did Facebook figure it out? Because I don't see people actually browsing the homepage anymore. What used to ne an exciting way to explore stuff has turned into a bunch of pictures and a couple of Facebook videos ripped off from YouTube. I haven't seen anyone browsing through their homepage excitingly in a very long time. Now it's just a chat platform.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#55
The "X is dying" article is dying. But seriously, I know every journalist wants to be the first to call the end of a trend but this is like calling the end of sentences or puppies. Time organised lists are here to stay.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#57
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that's just Twitter trying to jam bullshit down your throat.

You should unfollow the people who are posting bullshit. That's all stuff from people you chose to follow.

He's talking about the ordering, not the content. Even a carefully curated list of followers will be resulted in a timeline that's destroyed by Twitter's bizarre attempts to drive your attention towards the paid content that's forced on you.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#58
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the "while you were gone" feature is easily dismissed with a refresh

Yeah, the main effect of "while you were gone" is just that I have to reload the page twice when it stops updating or when I restart my browser. Dumb and mildly annoying, but only mildly.

It's always amazing how much shit people will put up with as part of their daily routine.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#59
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But making the algorithmic feed the default, alone, is enough to kill the platform. For the mere fact of nudging, and human laziness. It will just make the shit rise to the top, instead of the hidden gems that make Twitter golden. Twitter has to be one of the most poorly run tech companies, outside of Yahoo. They changed their API token limits, and destroyed 3rd party clients. They bought TweetDeck and then utterly d…

At a guess, they want to be able to charge companies to reach the people that are following them on Twitter just like Facebook does and they can't easily do that with reverse-chronological.

That's sort of the usual explanation: Shareholders see that Facebook is more popular and profitable than Twitter, hence they put pressure on Twitter to be more like Facebook. The problem being of course that no one needs a second Facebook.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#60

I recently got the algorithmic timeline for one of my more popular Twitter accounts. The algo has rendered it completely useless - it prioritizes all the wrong stuff and the lack of chronological ordering made it literally impossible to use during the debates. I wanted the sharp minute by minute commentary of my friends and news outlets but instead I was getting memes and dumb retweets from days ago. At least give th…

Use tweetbot instead of twitter. It's so much better in every way.
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