Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

I've always wondered how people who follow thousands of people are able to get much value from their timelines. I've concluded that they don't, or they are using lists or other tools to manage their Twitter experience.

Speaking of lists, I disagree with the author's claim that they are hard to set up. Twitter (and many Twitter apps) have made a list quite easy to set up, and monitor. Doing this is one way to handle the unfiltered feed problem.

He brings up an interesting point, though, regarding negative behaviors such as being less likely to follow new people. I agree that this can happen, but the flip side is people may be far more selective about who they follow as time goes on. Assuming that such users are regularly unfollowing bad or spammy accounts, their Twitter experience should improve over time.

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.

Have you posted on the "Who's hiring" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475879) thread?

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; but empirically, it didn't work for the mass market Twitter is going after.

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; (b) on the supply side, relevant native ads inside a recommendations stream are the business model.

For these reasons, I disagree with OP when he says "Twitter should not abandon its unfiltered feed". I know it will cause shock, shock, when they do it, but they will do it because it's so fundamental to their objectives as a mainstream consumer service.

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 to me - read everything they write, read only significant things they write (things which get more than ordinary likes/replies, or whatever), or ignore them. This is great for me, otherwise my entire Facebook feed would be filled with my 4-5 chattiest friends or current/former coworkers, I'd have to scroll through their collective 10-12 posts a day to see anyone elses, etc.

Twitter does not have this option where I publicly follow someone, due to them pressuring me to follow them on Twitter, but where I can actually privately ignore them. Which just tends to mean I use Twitter less. Maybe there is an option buried somewhere where I can do this, but it's definitely not obvious like on Facebook. Which just means I use Twitter a lot less. Because all it is for me is a constant stream of 4-5 chatty acquaintances with the dozens of others I follow popping in once in a while.

There are ways to deal with this on Twitter, but none of them are that good. I can create another account, but then there are problems from that - accounts with private tweets I no longer have access to or have to ask for two adds from everyone etc. I can create a private list without these people on it, but then I have to go to the trouble of maintaining two lists - the main list and the private list. Facebook just makes this a lot easier.