The Feed Is Dying • Hacker News Board

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#91

Post by a_small_island » Mon, May 02, 2016, 4:26 PM UTC

karmacondon wrote: post #79

Going to use HN for some quick market research... would anyone be willing to pay for a human curated news feed? Say $10 or $20 a month for someone to go through news sources and pick out the stories that will be interesting to you, and potentially summarize them? I'm thinking of curation based on a personal relationship instead of an algorithm. You would indicate that you're interested in machine learning, libertaria…

No, because I find I'm interesting in many things I wasn't aware of before reading about them.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#92

Post by JoshTriplett » Mon, May 02, 2016, 4:33 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #62

JoshTriplett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Sure; and while they're at it, they could get rid of the "reply" button and the notion that people are talking to each other rather than at each other.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#93

Post by WWKong » Mon, May 02, 2016, 4:36 PM UTC

So feed is dying or not? Seems it is thriving with curation?

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#94

Post by jkarneges » Mon, May 02, 2016, 6:18 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #66

jkarneges wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that there is a free market effect with how we sell our attention. Certainly this works well enough for TV, as ad-supported content is quite competitive with paid content.

Perhaps the problem arises when the product is not only free but also a virtual monopoly. Changing the TV channel is easy. Changing to a Twitter alternative is not. As consumers, we get to choose between an 80% Twitter or no Twitter at all.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#95

Post by viciousambition » Mon, May 02, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

Jgrubb wrote: post #6

yolesaber wrote: post #2

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…

On the web version go Settings -> Account. Under the "Content" section uncheck "show me the best tweets first". iOS app has a similar setting, and it stays synced with whatever is set there so however you disable it.

The best tweets eh? This cutesy language starts to become passive-aggressive after a while.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#96

Post by Kdparker » Mon, May 02, 2016, 11:36 PM UTC

meric wrote: post #52

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

However, with gmail filtering out email from untrusted domains, you could argue that you actually can't build an email host that can send emails to all of your friends.