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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

#91

Post by arc-in-space »

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…

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

If only that were actually so!

Back when I still bothered using twitter, I only followed a few friends, and read every single tweet, and yet the algorithmic feed seemed to make me entirely miss some. Not sure how that occured exactly, whether it was outright dropping them or making them difficult to find by pushing below older ones I've 'already read' and would stop scrolling on. Either way, as someone who indeed tried to just read everything, the default feed is a mess.

The other fundamental problem was that when people made references to some discussion or event, the out-of-order timeline made it impossible to follow what was happening.

I totally respect that some people just like the default feed, but for some of us it's completely unusable. It would not hurt you at all if the simple chronological timeline was an optional feature, but it does hurt me that it isn't.

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

#92

Post by lolive »

whiplash451 wrote: post #82
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.

The question is: who chooses the topic? In Google, the default results of the search engine can be circumvented by adding keywords to force the search algorithm to follow your thoughts. In Twitter, well... You hope Twitter won't be evil. [Guess what? It eventually will]

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

#93

Post by blacklight »

Just use Twitter's lists. I've been using them for a long time.

I added to one of my lists only the accounts that I really want to see on my feed (no old school friends, acquaintances, nor random people that some of the accounts I follow just started following: only sources with added value).

The result? Open your list, and you'll see all the tweets sorted chronologically, only from the accounts you really care to follow.

The quality of the time I spend on Twitter has dramatically increased since this change. No more time wasted scrolling through whatever irrelevant tweets the platform wants me to see. Twitter for me has basically become like an RSS feed aggregator with a curated list of sources to follow, reported in chronological order. And that's exactly what I wanted. Fck their algorithmic sht: I know better than them what I want to read.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

jwmoz wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by nkuttler »

blacklight wrote: post #93

Just use Twitter's lists. I've been using them for a long time. I added to one of my lists only the accounts that I really want to see on my feed (no old school friends, acquaintances, nor random people that some of the accounts I follow just started following: only sources with added value). The result? Open your list, and you'll see all the tweets sorted chronologically, only from the accounts you really care to fo…

Interesting, thanks for the suggestion. Is there an easy way to create a list with everybody I follow?

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

#96

Post by sdrinf »

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…

Last year, I throw some significant amount of time, energy, and dev focus to get into this; on the basis that I _wanted_ Mastodon to be a successful thing. To be specific, I've first spent around 2 weeks for "searching"/browsing (there's no search, only tags :/ ), seeking out acquaintances, and looking for topics/servers that would tickle my curiosity/insight senses.

There were none for me.

So, given that mastodon is large, and federated, surely the problem is with me right? So, I said fuck it, let's break out the API. I wrote a scraper, seeded with a few least-bad people's profile, programmed it to pull the last ~32 toots & add all connections of the user to scrape breadth-first to get a wide array of perspectives. ~150 servers & 50,000 toots. I then took my general keyword list (~150 items, representing majority of my interests in both layman and technical terms) that I use to evaluate social networks, and search engines, and crunched through the toots.

Results: deep technical terms have accidental hits, generally used either in different context; or scratching almost none of the surface. Wide terms generally pull very low signal, from the general vicinity of conspiracy theories/how bad twitter is/crypto/mastodon is great.

I'd really really would prefer to actually use Mastodon, but

1, the features they offer optimizes against it's own usage (lack of search, lack of discoverability; you can call this positive change, but again, it optimizes against onboarding & finding interesting stuff)

2, because it's federated, there's no-one dedicated to acquiring people who have better use of their time, and

3, the people who are in there, do not, currently, would lead me to level up in directions I care about.

Mastodon represents a set of preferences, and I'm happy for you that it seems to be aligning with yours; it does not aligns with mine, is all I'm saying.

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

#97

Post by oblio »

clhodapp wrote: post #41
ankit219 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is

... when they are created.

Social networks are inherently evil, that's their business model: manipulate users into addiction and serve ads.

How do non-evil social networks look like? They're forums, plain old forums.

But you don't become an ultra trillionaire with PhpBB.

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

#98

Post by oblio »

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.

Besides the shortcuts mentioned by the sibling comment, you can also just go from the exit (yes, you can enter through the exit), straight to the warehouse.

You need to know the name of what you're looking for and then use their kiosks to find where the thing is in the warehouse and just pick it up directly.

This trick turns 1 hour trips through Ikea into 5 minute trips.

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

#99

Post by Markoff »

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…

the problem with Nitter is you can see only one user's timeline, I want to see multiple users combined, then I can ditch Twitter site completely just for passive reading, but until then it's still more convenient with one account read multiple accounts in one timeline instead opening them one by one unless I'm missing something and Nitter allows combined timeline from multiple accounts

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

#100

Post by lucumo »

Ffs.

The availability of the chronological timeline is the only reason why Twitter still works for me and Facebook and LinkedIn don't. I keep seeing the same shit on the latter two, despite extensive attempts to train the recommender engine.

Facebook just keeps showing me the same posts over and over again. LinkedIn shows different posts, but they are all so cookie cutter similar that they might as well have been the same. And even more insipid, it will do a repeat of network updates at two weeks and four weeks. Nothing says "we got interesting content" more than reruns!

I'm soooo looking forward to Twitter being uninteresting repeats as well.

> But when I force close and re-open the app when looking at the Latest Tweets column, the Home feed is what Twitter shows first.

Great. Choose between keeping the app always-on or having boring shit first.

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