Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#21

Post by mmahemoff » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 8:04 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #12

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 t…

"I've always wondered how people who follow thousands of people are able to get much value from their timelines."

Simple: TweetDeck. I can see it now on my 2nd screen, with 32 columns allowing me to, yes, effectively follow thousands of accounts and topics using lists and filters.

Acquiring and growing TweetDeck is really the best thing Twitter's done, from a purely selfish experience, as it's become a fantastic research/communication tool.

It's obviously low priority for them, evidenced by shutting down the mobile clients, but it seems they are smart enough to keep it running to keep a percentage of power users active in the network.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#22

Post by lucb1e » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 8:20 PM UTC

There should be a distinction between friends and followers. I'd friend many more people, but I don't give a shit about most friend's tweets. (Most of them are about their current dinner, or something equally unimportant.) I think I currently follow around 15 people, and that's exactly right for how often I check my feed and how much time I want to spend on twitter.

So for me this works is fine, but I know many others that follow for social reasons, not because the person they start following is interesting. And if you do that, yes indeed your timeline will be overflowing all the time.

I've never not followed anyone for having too many tweets in my timeline already. And if someone starts spamming shit I don't care about (accounts with lots of followers sometimes abuse it for political or other things), I unfollow them without second thought. And I let them know why I unfollowed (like with downvotes here and on stackoverflow, I always try to comment if I do negative actions).

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#23

Post by teaneedz » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 8:21 PM 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.

The spproach may still work. Apple's walled garden has contributed to what many consider a good UE.

Having control of the UE is important.

However, I believe that Twitter could have managed the developer angst better. There was warning though.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#24

Post by amrnt » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 8:23 PM UTC

I write an article before about this issue that we have with most of the social networks: https://medium.com/editors-picks/b5eaaa3ff7c3

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#25

Post by utnick » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 8:33 PM UTC

I've wanted a twitter client similar to the old aim clients with respect to away messages.

Just a list of people I follow and their most recent tweet. Either ordered alphabetically or ordered by date last tweeted. If I hover over one of the people , then I can look at their past X tweets.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#26

Post by teaneedz » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 8:33 PM UTC

The OP is trying to solve a problem with a FB mentality. Twitter is a different animal. Lists solve many problems. Twitter could do a better job surfacing lists and making them easier to implement and return to, but we the users have a responsibility too I believe. We often complain about spammy accounts or unmanageable TLs when we control the Follow button.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#27

Post by b123400 » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 8:48 PM UTC

Personally I don't think Twitter cares much about the quality of users' timeline.

Twitter doesn't provide any easy way to manage followings while keep suggesting people to follow, because promoted accounts will be unfollowed easily.

I am one of the user in the official popular users list in China region, but most of my tweets are Japanese. This kind of careless mistake should not happen if they had do a simple review before selecting me. I've ask them to remove me from the list, but they never reply.

They seems to encourage users to keep following, increase the quantity not quality.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#28

Post by Terretta » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

sebkomianos wrote: post #16

Terretta wrote: post #2

If you like this article's ideas, are fascinated by social graphs and smoothing communication among nodes, enjoy functional programming (functional Scala, Clojure, etc), and are interested in a new job, drop me an email.

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

Haven't, but will, thanks. This was extremely topical, so thought I'd mention here where there were likely to be interested people.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#29

Post by klenwell » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 9:10 PM 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.

Tweetdeck best solved this issue for me on my phone. The widget felt just right as it allowed me to divide my feed up into 4 or 5 useful columns and I was able to periodically check in at what seemed like the right rate. I really felt I was up-to-speed with stuff that interested me.

After Twitter finally killed the Tweetdeck mobile client earlier this year, I moved on to the official Twitter client. But now I've got something like the problem described in the article. I can't seem to get my Twitter feed where I want it and I'm gradually losing interest. @GreatDismal has become my de-facto curator for Twitter and I've gone back to just using bookmarks for sites like HN and Reddit to keep up with what's trending.

Re: Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

#30

Post by protomyth » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 9:12 PM UTC

teaneedz wrote: post #23

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.

The spproach may still work. Apple's walled garden has contributed to what many consider a good UE. Having control of the UE is important. However, I believe that Twitter could have managed the developer angst better. There was warning though.

I can still write innovative apps for Apple's various OSes, but I cannot write an innovative Twitter client. They closed that door.

I think Twitter would have been better off just telling all the client writers that it was a requirement to show the "ad tweets" in the stream and call it a day. They are not Apple .