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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

#181

Post by wpietri »

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…

I agree that's a possible reason. But I don't think it's specifically necessary for Twitter, especially the sort of power user who wants a chronological timeline.

Whether or not they show topic data for a particular tweet, they generally have it. I only use the chronological timeline, and I cleared out the interests list a year or two back, but they have built up a profile of hundreds of interests for me.

I suspect forcing the ranked timeline on people is all about a small portion of Twitter juicing their engagement metrics, with no grand cross-team strategy in play.

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

#182

Post by wpietri »

sdrinf wrote: post #96
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…

Ooh, thanks for posting this analysis. I'd been hazily feeling like I should check out Mastodon, but only for reasons of theory. Sounds like Metcalfe's Law applies here, though, so you've saved me a bunch of time.

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

#183

Post by [deleted] »

baq wrote: post #108
oblio wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

i'd argue social networks only become evil if the want to grow revenue and earnings and more importantly keep growing them at some fixed rate y/y for too long (otherwise they get recategorized as value instead of growth and all the juicy multiples disappear from their stock grants...)

[deleted]

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

#184

Post by MBCook »

misnome wrote: post #55
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.

Chronological, always. Always at the same point when I reopen, I scroll upwards until I hit the latest tweet at the top, at which point I am done. I absolutely would not use Twitter if I had to use the website.

Agreed. No promoted tweets. No “what’s trending”. No suggesting I follow the influencer of the week.

Just the stuff I want to see in the order it was tweeted.

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

#186

Post by neallindsay »

dawnerd wrote: post #174
ubermonkey wrote: post #168

I use a third-party client. I never see this timeline chicanery at all. (Tweetbot is my choice, fwiw.)

I want to like Tweetbot, but ever since Twitter made those API changes it just hasn’t been the same.

Since then, Twitter has made some more third-party-client-friendly changes. You might want to check out Tweetbot again.

(For instance, voting on polls is still official-client-only, but you can see polls in Tweetbot and it gives you a link to the first-party client so you can vote.)

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

#187

Post by KarlKemp »

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'…

None of those motivations seem to make much sense. I’d bet on simple negligence: only a tiny minority insists on the chronological timeline and it’s therefore acceptable to annoy them from time to time.

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

#188

Post by spike021 »

oblio wrote: post #98
spike021 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn't work for my usecase there. I specifically went to check out a table in person. Not necessarily buy it. It was only on display in a showroom, not the warehouse section.

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

#189

Post by SECProto »

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…

Caveat: I immediately block anyone who adds me to a list (it's only happened 3 or 4 times and it seems spammy). And I've seen a number of other accounts with "don't add me to lists" or equivalent in their bio.

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

#190

Post by [deleted] »

ricardobeat wrote: post #64
fartcannon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]
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