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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

#11

Post by jsnell »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #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 scrolli…

The problem isn't with reordering the timeline. It's that the algorithmic timeline will insert all kinds of total garbage posted by people I don't follow into the timeline. The real timeline is easy to curate. Just follow people who post interesting things, then unfollow people who turn out to tweet too much about things you have no interest in. The algorithmic timeline makes that impossible.

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

#12

Post by kmeisthax »

nkozyra wrote: 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'…

With chronological timelines you either "run out" of content (because you've already refreshed like 15 times this hour and read everything the people you follow have said), or you get buried in content you don't want (because you're following people for hairdressing tips and they're all tweeting 20-page threads about why Putin is actually in the right somehow). Eventually you burn out and churn out.

With algorithmic timelines the system is deliberately optimizing for "what keeps you on the site", even if it's not new or not something you follow. Hence, you stay on longer and view more ads. There's nothing about chrono that makes advertising less effective; algorithmic timelines just keep people on site and thus keep them as part of your ad inventory.

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

#13

Post by amatecha »

If you want "Twitter" without ads, algorithmic feed manipulated by marketing, actual moderation, and actual community, I suggest joining a Mastodon[0] instance (and you probably already know people who are on the platform, making it easier to choose which instance ;)). It's kinda like using Twitter in 2007, but with way more features. For example, selective permissions per-"toot" ("followers only", or "unlisted" which makes it not show up on the public timeline, but still visible on your profile or to followers), content warning on toots (like a spoiler warning), full image description support, much longer posts...

Personally I'm closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon. Many in my social circle have already done so.

Oh, while I'm at it: if you want to view Twitter posts without having a Twitter account (or just don't want to see ads and trending crap), check out Nitter[1]. Alternative front-end. It also has minimal JS and is far more resource-efficient (viewing my profile loaded 1.56mb of resources on Nitter, compared to 9.2mb on Twitter)

[0] https://joinmastodon.org/

[1] https://nitter.net/

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

#14

Post by PragmaticPulp »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #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 scrolli…

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

You're not alone. I've switched back and forth but the algorithm wins every time for me. For me, the biggest downside of the chronological feed is that it is dominated by people who Tweet the most, which is an obvious outcome of pure chronological ordering.

The algorithmic feed seems to do a good job of showing me Tweets from people I've interacted with or whose Tweets I've liked. It's good at surfacing Tweets from people I follow who rarely Tweet while effectively rate-limiting the Tweets from the excessive Tweeters that I follow.

This is a strange article because Twitter is still giving the chronological fans what they want. I have no doubt that chronological feed is a rarely used feature and in 2022 it's guaranteed that Twitter has analytics to back up this decision.

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

#15

Post by PragmaticPulp »

nkozyra wrote: 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'…

> They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline

Or the simpler explanation is that the chronological timeline isn't actually the preferred setting, outside of a small but vocal minority.

If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all? I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate. If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature.

> 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.

I don't follow this logic. There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.

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

#16

Post by amatecha »

hanklazard wrote: post #6
MBCook wrote: 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?

on iOS, TweetBot is excellent. It has been the best iOS client (IMO) for years.

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

#17

Post by mttjj »

hanklazard wrote: post #6
MBCook wrote: 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?

Tweetbot if you’re on iOS. I’ve used it for probably close to a decade and nothing compares IMO. Always chronological timeline, no ads whatsoever, filters, mutes, etc. It’s just great. They recently moved to a subscription model (I know, I know) but it’s only like $5/year and way worth it. In the past, major versions were usually a $10-$20 upgrade price. Ever since they moved to this model the rate of updates and new features has really ramped up, too.

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

#18

Post by jsnell »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14
LeoPanthera wrote: post #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 scrolli…

> I feel like I'm the only person in the world who likes the "algorithmic" feed. You're not alone. I've switched back and forth but the algorithm wins every time for me. For me, the biggest downside of the chronological feed is that it is dominated by people who Tweet the most, which is an obvious outcome of pure chronological ordering. The algorithmic feed seems to do a good job of showing me Tweets from people I've…

> This is a strange article because Twitter is still giving the chronological fans what they want.

They definitely aren't doing that. The problem isn't that we disagree with the default, but that Twitter will not allow users to consistently switch back to the real timeline. The setting does not stick. They are constantly resetting it back; used to be that it could reset back multiple times per day. Now it happens maybe every month or two. (And of course also on every new device).

And now this change is even worse, at least according to the article. There will be no way to show the real timeline when opening the app, you'll always get the algorithmic view and have to manually switch. This really is not what anyone wants.

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