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Twitter's new timeline feature

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Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#111

Post by geostyx »

jchendy wrote: post #96
snowwrestler wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this has already been real-world tested, and manual sorting loses to algorithms. Facebook had categories or lists (can't remember what they called them) and few people used them. Google+ had the "circles" as a key differentiator vs. Facebook, and it did not help them compete at all. I think social media lists are one of those ideas that seems great in theory, but whose value is dynamically unstable in rea…

Does anybody know how Multireddits are working out? I personally use them extensively, but I've never seen any data on how successful they've been overall.

The only multireddit I ever use is the top 100 nsfw subs one...

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#112

Post by sangnoir »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #40
majewsky wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate "While you were away" with a passion, especially the part where (on mobile) after dismissing it, it asks you "Did you like this?", yet it can't take a hint after the 20th "No".

I've come to suspect that it's asking me whether I liked the tweets , not the feature . So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite.

> So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite.

On the official android client, you can dismiss the second popup without clicking on "I like this" or "I hate this" by clicking anywhere on the screen. I'm not going to train your stupid robot for your stupid feature.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#113

Post by yolesaber »

davidpatrick wrote: post #104
yolesaber wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what lists are for. I follow over 400 people but have them segmented into lists and its never unmanageable for me.

I feel like lists need more attention. It is such a pain to navigate to on mobile. A lot of people don't even know they exist.

Agreed. Rather than dragging users kicking and screaming into an algorithmic timeline, why not play up the strengths of features they already built? Especially since lists allow you to target a user more directly - you can analyze the accounts in the list and get a rough estimate of what the category is - and could generate more revenue for them.

Twitter would be really really cool if you could have your lists and then swipe through them like you do with the "Moments" feature (which is awful)

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#114

Post by pavel_lishin »

sangnoir wrote: post #112
pavel_lishin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to suspect that it's asking me whether I liked the tweets , not the feature . So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite.

> So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite. On the official android client, you can dismiss the second popup without clicking on "I like this" or "I hate this" by clicking anywhere on the screen. I'm not going to train your stupid robot for your stupid feature.

I've started doing this, but there's still the problem that those tweets that it thinks I love ... seem to disappear from the timeline.

If I see a "you may have missed..." tweet that was sent an hour ago, if I scroll down to that point in my time line, it's not there.

All I want is a fucking RSS feed of tweets, tbh, organized by date. Nothing more, nothing less. Go ahead and cram it full of ads, like they've already done - just don't try to fucking sort it for me.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#115

Post by sangnoir »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #114
sangnoir wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite. On the official android client, you can dismiss the second popup without clicking on "I like this" or "I hate this" by clicking anywhere on the screen. I'm not going to train your stupid robot for your stupid feature.

I've started doing this, but there's still the problem that those tweets that it thinks I love ... seem to disappear from the timeline. If I see a "you may have missed..." tweet that was sent an hour ago, if I scroll down to that point in my time line, it's not there. All I want is a fucking RSS feed of tweets, tbh, organized by date. Nothing more, nothing less. Go ahead and cram it full of ads, like they've already…

> there's still the problem that those tweets that it thinks I love ... seem to disappear from the timeline

I had not noticed that! I always dismiss the "you may have missed" without reading, it's quite insidious. It's time I changed clients

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#117

Post by tbirdx »

tombrossman wrote: post #90
tfgg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I, and I suspect quite a lot of their users, stopped using Twitter for quite a while because the velocity was just too high, the signal wasn't good enough. The stuff you might have missed feature has actually made me use it much more, now I can actually catch those quality tweets. I'm sure someone is going to tell me that I should unfollow more people, but that seems like a pretty crude and destructive metho…

Well I'll say it then, you really should unfollow more people. To a point, the more you unfollow the better the signal to noise ratio improves. You just have to find that point. It isn't crude or destructive at all because you will see those good quality tweets from people who are heavy users. You will see them when others who you still follow retweet the good ones. Your feed should be a solid mix of tweets you curat…

> It can be a bit awkward to unfollow people you know

Mute them. It works well, and if they are engaged with others you follow it is all there, uncensored. So it isn't as harsh as a block, and they generally don't know about you putting it in place because you can still interact when your friends do, or when you choose.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#118

Post by argonaut »

infogulch wrote: post #87
snowwrestler wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this has already been real-world tested, and manual sorting loses to algorithms. Facebook had categories or lists (can't remember what they called them) and few people used them. Google+ had the "circles" as a key differentiator vs. Facebook, and it did not help them compete at all. I think social media lists are one of those ideas that seems great in theory, but whose value is dynamically unstable in rea…

So if the problem with lists is that they require effort to maintain them, how about lists with algorithmic maintenance suggestions? People that are hands-off can leave it fully automatic, whereas others could still make use of suggestions to maintain their fine-tuned lists more easily.

Still requires effort to maintain. You have to click to add friends. Take a page from Facebook. It's now really hard to manage lists; they encourage you to use automatically-generated lists, though. I'm sure they had reams of data to support this (over the objections of vocal power users).

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#119

Post by argonaut »

ablanton wrote: post #92
blorgle wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is the assumption that the algorithm will do a half decent job at showing you important tweets. Judging by the facebook algorithm, which is utterly terrible at showing important stuff, it seems unlikely. Just another step in the facebookification of twitter to appease short term oriented shareholders who rated the growth too highly. It is already a mess, can't see how adding this will improve the sit…

I left facebook for this exact reason. the platform has diminished so greatly that it's now virtually unusable to me.I'm really not sure what to equate the experience to, it feels like trying to read a newspaper that is all ads. It's all vapid useless sales instead of meaningful interpersonal connections over long distances... the way it started. I fear twitter is not far behind.

Yes. I totally hope Twitter follows in the footsteps of the $200B+ Facebook.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#120

Post by lukewrites »

snowwrestler wrote: post #77
lukewrites wrote: post #57

I think twitter would be better off embracing lists. I follow relatively few people because of the firehose effect. My attitude towards the people I follow is that I like seeing their tweets, but I don't really care if I miss them. News would be a good example of this. It's great to get news or sports tweets in the moment, but they're probably not tweets I'm going to go back through later to find out what happened. O…

I feel like this has already been real-world tested, and manual sorting loses to algorithms. Facebook had categories or lists (can't remember what they called them) and few people used them. Google+ had the "circles" as a key differentiator vs. Facebook, and it did not help them compete at all. I think social media lists are one of those ideas that seems great in theory, but whose value is dynamically unstable in rea…

(If I could edit my original post, I'd change "better off" to "should also". I didn't mean to say that the use of lists and an algorithmic news feed is an either-or proposition.)

I agree with you, and think your examples from fb and G+ are compelling. Anything that adds entropy for the user is a hard-if-not-impossible sell. In reflecting on all this, I realized I like lists because they make twitter useful. News feeds, by contrast, make social media entertaining. So: where do the twain meet? I'd suggest two models: "smart" lists and curated lists.

A real world example of smart lists would be feedly. When I add an RSS feed to my account, feedly suggests a category for it. I'd say the suggested categories are accurate 80%+ of the time. If twitter were to implement this so when you follow someone twitter automatically suggests a list you could add the person to, it would both benefit the follower (I have topic-based lists I can look at, and I didn't have to do anything!) and the person being followed (hey, I got a new follower!).

Curated lists could be straight up useful (list-lover that I am, I subscribe to some other users' lists). With the advent of Moments, it's clear twitter is open to curation; how about encouraging individual to provide curated lists?

I don't think that twitter will go the way of focusing on lists, but I think there could be significant value in simply making lists a bit more prominent.

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