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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

#61
post #51

I hate Twitter for all the change they've made-more spam and useless engagement features. I noticed this in testing some time ago, constantly making it hard just to see what I want, not the Algo suggested tweets, other peoples likes, spam etc. Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust. Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese lan…

> Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube

You are lucky! I obviously share IP at home with my children, but how is my 13 years old daughter getting disgusting commercials (all in Portuguese for some reason??) of "Manscape" products, women's "spray everywhere even there" deodorant, some soap where interracial couple does everything other than THAT under the shower... and few others jaw-droppers I honestly forgot by now. And tons and tons of crypto spam. I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore?? has to be some bot fishing for keywords and nude, if none, then approve.

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

#63
They’ve made the decision to lay down the algorithm long ago.

Mind you, I can absolutely see that activity on Twitter has only been going up recently. Which would be great if 80% of it wasn’t self-promotion, crypto babble and spam, plagiarized content, and LinkedIn style “expert” threads.

On top of that, all of the promoted tweets I see are junk content farms.

It hasn’t been an ideal place for connecting with friends for a while, and now it’s becoming an absolute shit hole for decent content or professional communities. What will be left?

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

#64
post #51

I hate Twitter for all the change they've made-more spam and useless engagement features. I noticed this in testing some time ago, constantly making it hard just to see what I want, not the Algo suggested tweets, other peoples likes, spam etc. Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust. Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese lan…

That sucks! You know, you don't have to see advertisements. And you don't have to log into google. You can subscribe to feeds with RSS.

Twitter is (was?) for 1:1 discourse and updates, not consuming news or long form content. If you used Twitter like an RSS feed you were doing it wrong

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

#66
post #51

I hate Twitter for all the change they've made-more spam and useless engagement features. I noticed this in testing some time ago, constantly making it hard just to see what I want, not the Algo suggested tweets, other peoples likes, spam etc. Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust. Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese lan…

I agree, If you have enough followers on Twitter the retweet, like and "similar posters" spam is already so severe that rather than scrolling down a mile to see if someone I follow posted the previous night I end up just visiting their profile from memory.

If this gets any worse I will just in frustration stop using the platform.

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

#67
post #51

I hate Twitter for all the change they've made-more spam and useless engagement features. I noticed this in testing some time ago, constantly making it hard just to see what I want, not the Algo suggested tweets, other peoples likes, spam etc. Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust. Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese lan…

> Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube You are lucky! I obviously share IP at home with my children, but how is my 13 years old daughter getting disgusting commercials (all in Portuguese for some reason??) of "Manscape" products, women's "spray everywhere even there" deodorant, some soap where interracial couple does everything other than THA…

I don’t get it. Your teenager sees advertising for body soaps, hair grooming for men, and an ad has an interracial couple? I cannot see what is remotely disgusting.

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

#68

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 was possible way before the algorithmic feed was introduced, via the “tweets you may have missed” section. It bubbled up the relevant ones without adding a ton of recommendation garbage.

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

#69

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…

It's the only way I can use Twitter and for the same reason as you said. I'm not on Twitter all the time, so I only see probably about 1~5% of my full TL. I'd prefer to read "important" ones between my two visits, instead of whatever posted newest.

And the lists are still reverse-chronological so if I need to see specific things in order I can still find them.

With that said, this change is very backward. The old UI is already perfect, everyone gets what they want.

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

#70
post #23

Tweak New Twitter [0] can automatically keep you on Latest Tweets and hide the new timeline tabs, even if Latest Tweets is "unpinned" [1] (as long as the implementation hasn't changed significantly since the last A/B test they did of timeline tabs on web) [0] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter [1] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/issues/78

I can recommend "Tweet New Twitter" too. It allows users fine-grained control of Twitter's features (algorithmic content, retweets, UI changes and more).

The only small criticism that I have is that there is no button or keyboard shortcut to quickly disable it in the case that I actually need one of the disabled features). For that you can quickly bring up Firefox' addons dialog via Ctrl+Shift+A though, to disable the addon completely.

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