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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

#81

Post by violetthrift »

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 do like some elements of the algorithmic feed, like surfacing things that several of my friends like or other interesting tweets from outside my immediate network. But the downside I've noticed is that this view is also far more likely to put contentious or abrasive tweets in front of me, because that's the kind of content that gets "engagement." For me, the rise in blood pressure isn't worth sometimes seeing an interesting tweet.

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

#82

Post by whiplash451 »

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'…

A chronological timeline has benefits but will look very dull compared to a timeline where Twitter can put in front of you stuff that's related to recent news but that was posted a while ago. The key is to push topics in front of you, not the latest thing that was said.

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

#83

Post by sph »

nickdothutton wrote: post #78

Twitter is now deep into the “every new release makes the product worse” stage of life.

Reddit as well, though it seems to me Twitter tries harder to make itself hated to its power users. I reckon they've decided they've become so indispensable and irreplaceable they can do whatever they want to maximise profit.

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

#84

Post by dochtman »

spike021 wrote: post #58
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…

Don't forget IKEA. I went the other day just to look at a dining table. It was only in the 3rd or 4th showroom. Of course, to get out I had to wander through the majority of like 13 or 14 other showrooms because you pretty much can only take the linear path to get to an exit.

Generally Ikea stores have a few shortcuts, but you usually have to pay attention to find them.

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

#85

Post by robryan »

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?

Harpy on Android is pretty solid. Nice UI and loads fast. I seem to have some issues viewing threads when navigating to them from a retweet but I may just be missing something.

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

#86

Post by colechristensen »

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'…

I would bet there’s a phenomenon at work here where you can addict almost everybody for a short time by doing X but long term a few become hardcore addicts and most become alienated.

It’s hard to tell that your actions have changed the kind of user who is most engaged until your platform is destroyed and consists of users who barely pay attention and addicts that feed off of each other and not much else (Facebook).

Metrics lie and optimizing for certain performance metrics ends up optimizing for exploiting human weaknesses which is actually somewhat uncommon in the population, which explains the process of optimizing your platform into irrelevance.

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

#87

Post by ifkngluvscience »

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'…

Why is it a foregone conclusion that it's about straightforward monetization, or even monetization at all?

What if it's actually a way to hide specific topics or sentiments from the timeline? If the algorithm of what to show first is a black box, scales can be tipped just like Google does with search results.

If it's a pure chronological timeline, you either have to be blatant in not displaying the tweets you want to suppress, or let people see them.

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

#88

Post by ptato »

amatecha wrote: post #13

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" whic…

I don't know anyone who uses Mastodon, and whenever I've tried it every instance seems barren. I would love to ditch Twitter though.

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

#89

Post by fredsted »

I see a lot of posters saying they don't like the algo feed, but I prefer it. When I launch twitter, I really want to see what's going on, what I've missed and what the current popular posts are. I follow hundreds of accounts, and if I were to go through it all in rev chron order, it would take hours.

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

#90

Post by NGRhodes »

fredsted wrote: post #89

I see a lot of posters saying they don't like the algo feed, but I prefer it. When I launch twitter, I really want to see what's going on, what I've missed and what the current popular posts are. I follow hundreds of accounts, and if I were to go through it all in rev chron order, it would take hours.

In theory I would like this feature for discovery, but the signal to noise ratio for me is terrible, I have tried to use it, blocking 20 topics and it's still a poor experience for me. I could well be an outlier for this feature.
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