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The Feed Is Dying

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Re: The Feed Is Dying

#61

Post by joelrunyon »

partiallypro wrote: post #5

The Feed is fantastic for live, on going events. I don't see how it can be replaced. Of course Twitter has meandered in using an algorithm in their timeline, which is just a huge mistake. The entire point of Twitter is that it's the world as it is happening now; it's still shocking that Jack, etc don't understand this fact and are continually trying to take the very things that made Twitter unique out of the platform…

The weird part is they do understand this (they pitch periscope as "live" all the time).

Seems really strange that when they get to their main product, they forget about all that.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#62

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #19
slyall wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the "whiule you were" gone thing. Useful for when I woke up in the morning and it shows me half a dozen overnight tweets. Usually a couple of these are good. A few months ago the "gone" time got reduced to just a few hours which was a little annoying but survivable. I don't really want to go 100% algorithmic though. If I just wanted to see the popular stuff I'd follow buzzfeed or something.

"While you were gone" breaks completely when it grabs one tweet out of a series of tweets, out of context. And it has far too subtle a break (a tiny bit of vertical whitespace and no new heading) to indicate the end of the "highlights" and the start of the content I actually want.

'Series of tweets' pretty much break everything anyway. Twitter should discourage them, IMO.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#64

Post by mrweasel »

>Unfortunately, chronological order doesn’t scale well.

True, I guess, but what if my feed is already curated, by me. Facebook, for instance is annoying to use, because it can't seem to remember that I just want everything, in chronological order. I don't have a ton a people on Facebook, nor do I care to, but I do want to see everything these people post. It won't amount to more than 30 minutes of content a week anyway.

If you had to enable "curated feed", would you turn it on? For most people, even those who have a large number friends or follow a ton of people/companies, I suspect the answer would be no.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#65

Post by rdslw »

I see two big problems with algorithmic/curated feeds: * conflict of interest between reader and (algo) curator. FB (as an example) wants reader to stay as long as possible on its site and to make the reader to regular comeback to FB, including preferring by the reader FB and not others. This is done by (algo) curator playing with our dopamine levels (read novelty seeking preference of human brains) presenting things which create 1 (stay) and 2 (comeback). In fact feed is curated based only on 1 and 2 with constantly run A/B experiments by FB. This is WRONG to reader. * all this 'feeling connected' being 'within circle of similar to you people' etc, puts you in a closed circle of opinions/views. This cramps critical thinking of the reader. Whats' more dangerous, it distorts (humans are really weak on this) our view how world is composed. We see too much of sth, and dont see (curator removed them) things we don't agree with. We conclude how world is constructed (e.g. everybody supports some presidency candidate, because 80% of "likes" and "shares" in my stream are about him (concluded by curator because I clicked on some of them). This has WRONG influence on our learning and critical thinking and forms untrue perception of world impairing our reasoning.

p.s. sorry for my english.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#66

Post by fauigerzigerk »

jkarneges wrote: post #48
gue5t wrote: post #4

When users don't own their technology, they get jerked around by whoever does until they jump ship for greener pastures. You can claim the market will solve this (users will sell their time and speech to a higher bidder, now that Twitter's prices no longer seem competitive), but if people were empowered to have their computers do what they want, it never would have happened in the first place.

The market can't solve anything if the product is free. Users aren't voting with their wallet. Twitter (and other dominant free products like Facebook) will behave the way our overlords want them to behave. Consumers have surrendered the free market. Capitalism is only played behind the scenes.

>The market can't solve anything if the product is free

It can absolutely work. The product is not free. The product is our attention and internet services (Twitter/Google/Facebook) are competing for that limited supply of attention in order to sell it on to their advertising customers. We won't give our attention to them for free though, so they have to buy it by providing a service we want. If they don't provide an attractive enough service, we turn around and sell our attention to someone else. That's how this market works.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#67

Post by hebbarp »

How about time being the best curator? I see what is live. I have a choice to see the past by scrolling back. I can't see the future, well for obvious reasons. For news/event based content, chronological is the best bet, IMHO. For content of archival value, one can apply various curation techniques. So the assertion that the feed is dying is wrong. It can't and it won't.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#68

Post by sambe »

I've really felt like there's been a large decrease in feed quality of the last six months to one year on Facebook and Twitter.

Feed is now dominated by adverts, endlessly shared click-bait, repeat content (especially if conspiratorial/shocking/fake - a variation on click bait), and the "you interact with this person sometimes, here's everything they ever do". And begging me to follow Zuckerberg. Compared to a couple of years ago it seems boring and shallow.

FB is particularly bad, but partly seems my friends are part of the problem (and/or click bait is hugely on the rise; it works). Twitter maybe a bit less so, but this out-of-sequence stuff is terrible. Also miss the early Twitter days when I found interesting randoms to follow from the public firehose, now all celebrity focussed.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#69

Post by icebraining »

kordless wrote: post #36
guelo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of Jack taking over is that what made Twitter unique was not good enough for Wall Street.

I say fuck both of them. How long are we going to let companies being directed by people who want more money keep building software we can't stop using and causes us more suffering than the last version? Wall Street, Jack and their like promise things like "connect with friends" but it's really "look at content that makes us money". The worst part? We helped them do it to ourselves. It's time to think differently abo…

Wasn't that the whole basis of App.net? A crowd-funded Twitter-like social media platform that wasn't beholden to VCs and their demands?
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