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Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

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Re: Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

#4
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who likes the "algorithmic" feed.

In theory I follow few enough people to be able to sit down and read every tweet - I rarely want to. The magical "algorithm" seems to do a reasonable job of raising tweets with high activity, or tweets from people I often interact with, to the top.

This seems entirely reasonable to me, and if I want to see the rest, I can just keep scrolling.

Perhaps it is more of a problem if you follow hundreds of people. But I don't do that, and if I did, I'd never be able to read everything anyway.

Re: Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

#6
post #2

I really like Twitter, I follow a lot of great people and discover a lot of great things on it. But I don’t understand how anyone uses their website or the official client. If it wasn’t for a third-party client I think I’d give up pretty fast.

Which third party client do you recommend?

Re: Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

#7
Part of the reason twitter is so great is that reading posts chronologically gives you a feeling of connection and immediacy in communication. I like reading posts from 5 seconds ago, conversations only yet halfway through, absolute bleeding edge breaking news, it's unique among social media platforms in this regard and that makes it feel very alive. But I don't get that from the algorithm, my timeline turns into more of a constantly rotating greatest hits reel of posts in my corner of the network graph. That's cool, ha ha very funny meme. But it doesn't feel "alive" then, it feels like FB/IG/Tiktok. Which kind of ruins the point of why I enjoy twitter in the first place.

Re: Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

#8
They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline for ... well, forever.

As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline.

But I can't fathom why seemingly no effort has gone into monetizing a chronological timeline. Why is it's foregone conclusion that it won't work with advertising the way the algorithmic was works?

Re: Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

#9
I feel like a smuggler. I closed my Twitter account due to such shenanigans, and now read my favorite tweeters via Nitter RSS feeds. None of the various Twitter bovine excrement comes along for the ride, just the words of the people I intend to follow, in the order posted. No ads, no trending topics, no shocking takes from a friend of a friend of a friend. And for me the read-only nature of this arrangement is a bonus feature.

So it's probably just a matter of time before this route is plugged.

Re: Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

#10
post #8

They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline for ... well, forever. As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline. But I can't fathom why seemingly no effort has gone into monetizing a chronological timeline. Why is it'…

I don't think there's any issue monetizing a chronological timeline.

The issue for them I imagine is retention: with chronological, it's likely that when you visit Twitter the first few messages you see are not interesting and you leave. But if they put a tweet that's popular among your social group in front of you? Odds are that's interesting to you and you stick around a bit longer.

I dislike that, to be clear, but I imagine this is the human behavior for >90% of people.

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