Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#41

Post by dantheman » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 11:47 PM UTC

fudged71 wrote: post #39

perlpimp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lists are useless imo, they are just like contact lists in skype or aim chat. And to make them there is no reward after. Lists would be useful to organize people and give different rules to have posts leak into main feed. for example posts with at least 2 retweets and/or 2 likes. if they'd make something like that, that would be awesome. For now I just don't bother I scan fast enought to find interesting bits for me.…

Have you tried seperating your lists into different columns in Tweetdeck? That seems to be what they were made for.

yeah that's how i use them

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#42

Post by ProblemFactory » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 12:10 AM UTC

mmahemoff wrote: post #18

ProblemFactory wrote: post #11

Automated filtering approaches like Facebook's edgerank are a band-aid fix for fundamentally wrong user interface. For me, there is no content on the internet that is time-critical and has to be consumed in the order it was posted, or as soon as it was posted. The great thing about the Google Reader interface was that you can sign up to 300 blogs, and see which ones have new posts in the left hand column. You read th…

With respect, Google Reader was used by a tiny fraction of the internet population, despite being operated by the biggest online brand for 8 years. The majority of people opted to get their news from sites and services which used some combination of human and computer powered filtering. I agree the Google Reader model is fantastic for information junkies (in a good way :) with relatively advanced technical skills; bu…

> So I don't see Edgerank as a band-aid fix, but a fundamental requirement for a large-scale system like this. Because (a) on the demand side, recommendations are what people actually want - let computers do what they're good at and reduce the human tedium of sifting through inane FourSquare checkins etc

I can't speak for everyone, but I believe the Google Reader model would work for most people. The interface is entirely based on the source, not the post content, the keywords, or an algorithmically derived importance.

There is nothing technical about it: you notice who posts interesting content and who does not. There is no need for automatically ranking the importance of two posts from separate sources, people are very good at deciding who they find interesting.

Edgerank or proposed twitter feeds of the future are based on the idea of algorithmically figuring out what is the most important news for you right now. But if you don't care about learning about the "news" two weeks later, then a source-based manual filtering would let the user do that far better than a ML algorithm can. And if it's out of date in two weeks, it wasn't worth reading at all.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#43

Post by joe_the_user » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 1:02 AM UTC

I am a pretty heavy Facebook user and can't see the slightest use in Twitter. Or rather, it seems like an actively awful thing.

Facebook already allows and even encourages short posts. Forcing them seems like recipe to produce horrid dreck and that does seem just like what Twitter does.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#44

Post by Pxtl » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 1:29 AM UTC

ProblemFactory wrote: post #11

Automated filtering approaches like Facebook's edgerank are a band-aid fix for fundamentally wrong user interface. For me, there is no content on the internet that is time-critical and has to be consumed in the order it was posted, or as soon as it was posted. The great thing about the Google Reader interface was that you can sign up to 300 blogs, and see which ones have new posts in the left hand column. You read th…

Yeah, my first introduction to Twitter was frustrating because I was trying to use it like a feed... Twitter is not a substitute for feeds. The total lack of "weight" given to things that you have a high-interest in vs. things you have a low-interest in (but have an incredibly high postcount) made that kind of usage frustrating for me.

Twitter is a good platform in some ways - it's simple, sensible and effective. But it scratches a very particular itch and seems to fail both as an RSS-like platform (I want to read everything that comes out from sources X, Y, and Z) and as a "what's exciting right now" platform such as Reddit where the best of the best bubbles to the top.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#45

Post by lancewiggs » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 3:20 AM UTC

pastProlog wrote: post #20

One phenomenon which Facebook takes into account which Twitter does not is that of the loquacious acquaintance, possibly someone with a business constantly hyping things, possibly someone who just likes to hear themselves speak more often than I do. They apply slight pressure to me to follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook so I do so. On Facebook I can easily set people to three settings which are private…

I have one list (top 80 or so) and the firehose (thousands). The list is for the people who I don't really want to miss, and the firehose is for dipping into now and then. Excessive verbosity belongs in the firehose.

I occasionally promote and demote, and as a private list nobody is the wiser. I assume others do this too.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#46

Post by tedyoung » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 3:26 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #14

I do wonder, if Twitter hadn't gone psycho on the twitter clients, if this problem would have been solved. Twitter stopped most development on this issue for anyone outside Twitter.

I was working on a Twitter client that did something very much like this (partitioning people into different streams, etc.), but once I saw the way the wind was blowing (in terms of how Twitter didn't want third-party developers), I now only run it on my machine for my own use.