Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 235 posts

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

#41

Post by clhodapp »

ankit219 wrote: post #40
slimsag wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With reverse chronological timeline, it's harder to build a advertising profile. While it's important to know what tweets a user is interacting with, the personalization option can surface more things as "You might like", "You follow x, and he liked", "Interesting tweet on the topics you follow/might like" and so on. Whether or not you choose to interact with anyone or more of those is a signal, and helps with advert…

As a side-note: a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is when they start conflating liking and sharing by implementing the "You follow x, and he liked" feature that you described. Since this clearly violates the user's intention (if you wanted to share something, you would have shared it), this serves as a subtle but distinct signal that manipulating users has become more important than listening to them.

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

#42

Post by raverbashing »

wodenokoto wrote: post #36
anonymoushn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hotels can try boosting user retention, as measured by minutes spent in the room, by hiding guests' belongings while they are away.

That's pretty much the thinking behind layouts of malls and grocery stores. Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating. Malls try to balance enabling people to find what…

I wonder how much of this is an urban legend

There's a reason why refrigerated items are usually at the back: fridges usually face a wall. You can have a shelf at the back sometimes but that's not always possible

Also, for those quick purchases you can always go to somewhere closer, a gas station, etc.

In fact in Europe some places do have the quick purchases right in front of the store so you don't need to go around (Tesco as an example).

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

#43

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15
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…

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

you can justify a lot of things with "the silent majority doesn't mind it". the silent majority is tech-illiterate, and there are a lot of things they are indifferent to. if it wasn't for the loud minority, we'd be advancing into the dystopian future at much faster pace.

>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.

the overwhelming majority will always use whichever option is the default

>If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature.

that will eventually happen, and when it does, I'm sure I'll read about how that is a good thing

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

#45

Post by lattalayta »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15
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…

If the feed is strictly chronological, then the user has a better chance of knowing when they've seen everything, and won't come back to the content until more time has passed.

With the algorithmic feed, you could refresh the page at any time and get a different personalized set of posts that make it feel like your feed is more active than it actually is.

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

#46

Post by happytiger »

IRP wrote: post #3

I deeply hate the algorithmic (Home) version. It seems to totally hide the tweets of people who don't have a certain ranking. What's the point of following someone's account if Tweeter doesn't even show me what they are posting?

This is exactly why I’ve more or less stopped using it. Twitter seems to have become not useful.

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

#47

Post by ifvictr »

I have a bookmark of their mobile web app on my phone’s home screen now. Works great as a replacement if you don’t mind losing features like push notifications and the ability to speak in Spaces! It also has the benefit of tweet drafts syncing from your other web browsers.

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

#48

Post by Lammy »

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.

> or the official client

With https://github.com/haoict/twitter-no-ads and https://repo.packix.com/package/com.alwayslatesttimelinetwit...

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

#49

Post by malwarebytess »

bmlzootown wrote: post #22

GoodTwitter2[0] is the only reason that I still use the web version anymore. I can handle the mobile interface on a mobile device, but making the desktop experience mobile-themed was the straw that almost broke the camel's back. GoodTwitter2 mostly fixes that, thankfully. The userscript also fixes the reverse-chronological issue. There's literally a setting that enables one to force "Latest Tweets First" mode, so it'…

Do you know how to access GT2 settings? I can't seem to find it after installing the script and confirming it works.

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

#50

Post by rrradical »

raverbashing wrote: post #42
wodenokoto wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much the thinking behind layouts of malls and grocery stores. Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating. Malls try to balance enabling people to find what…

I wonder how much of this is an urban legend There's a reason why refrigerated items are usually at the back: fridges usually face a wall. You can have a shelf at the back sometimes but that's not always possible Also, for those quick purchases you can always go to somewhere closer, a gas station, etc. In fact in Europe some places do have the quick purchases right in front of the store so you don't need to go around…

Nah, I saw this on my last shopping trip to a mega grocery. Bought basically all the items on my list on the right side of the store (produce, other food stuffs) and then had to walk past a half dozen aisles filled with random crap (non food) to get eggs from the dairy section.
Post reply on HN