The Feed Is Dying • Hacker News Board

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#81

Post by FussyZeus » Mon, May 02, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #5

The Feed is fantastic for live, on going events. I don't see how it can be replaced. Of course Twitter has meandered in using an algorithm in their timeline, which is just a huge mistake. The entire point of Twitter is that it's the world as it is happening now; it's still shocking that Jack, etc don't understand this fact and are continually trying to take the very things that made Twitter unique out of the platform…

Twitter has been trying to become Facebook for years, failing to realize that we already have Facebook, we don't need ANOTHER Facebook.

Sadly I seem to have missed the golden years of Twitter.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#82

Post by overcast » Mon, May 02, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

All the more reason I've felt better about closing my "social media" accounts. The little that was useful, has been rendered worthless.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#83

Post by erichocean » Mon, May 02, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

[DELETED]

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#84

Post by mynegation » Mon, May 02, 2016, 1:55 PM UTC

erichocean wrote: post #83

[DELETED]

Ask your friend if they have a patent.If they do not - tell them to get it first. Then try to do something with it, they can always sell it if that does not work.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#85

Post by partiallypro » Mon, May 02, 2016, 2:25 PM UTC

r3bl wrote: post #54

partiallypro wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But making the algorithmic feed the default, alone, is enough to kill the platform. For the mere fact of nudging, and human laziness. It will just make the shit rise to the top, instead of the hidden gems that make Twitter golden. Twitter has to be one of the most poorly run tech companies, outside of Yahoo. They changed their API token limits, and destroyed 3rd party clients. They bought TweetDeck and then utterly d…

Did Facebook figure it out? Because I don't see people actually browsing the homepage anymore. What used to ne an exciting way to explore stuff has turned into a bunch of pictures and a couple of Facebook videos ripped off from YouTube. I haven't seen anyone browsing through their homepage excitingly in a very long time. Now it's just a chat platform.

I see people every day going scrolling through their timeline on the Facebook app on their phone. Maybe it depends on your what your timeline's algo is showing you. I will say that I see much less Facebook engagement on the whole from people ~28 and younger, even in chat; people have shifted to Snapchat. Of course I'm a Windows Mobile user, so I am totally in the dark in that area because their CEO hates Microsoft.

But that doesn't really have much to do with what I'm saying, Facebook has figured out that original content is important (something it now lacks; if you don't include Instagram), that doesn't mean they've found the solution. Twitter doesn't seem to know that is important, but they already have somewhat of a solution.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#86

Post by settsu » Mon, May 02, 2016, 2:31 PM UTC

jcoffland wrote: post #55

The "X is dying" article is dying. But seriously, I know every journalist wants to be the first to call the end of a trend but this is like calling the end of sentences or puppies. Time organised lists are here to stay.

Any journalist that "wants to be the first to call the end of a trend" has ceased being a journalist and has become a marketer.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#87

Post by k2enemy » Mon, May 02, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

dangerlibrary wrote: post #32

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close - at least not for consumers. See: @aol, @yahoo, @hotmail, @comcast, @gmail etc.... Enterprises usually own their servers, so I would grant that caveat, but even that is going away with cloud providers.

Email is an open protocol that many providers have implemented. That's an important distinction. Try sending a tweet to a Weibo user and see how that works out.

A year ago I would have agreed with you, but it is getting to the point where it is very difficult to run your own mail server (I still do).

In the name of fighting spam, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. have made it a real chore to get messages delivered to their networks. I still haven't figured out how to get messages delivered to AOL.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#88

Post by Yhippa » Mon, May 02, 2016, 2:56 PM UTC

sambe wrote: post #68

I've really felt like there's been a large decrease in feed quality of the last six months to one year on Facebook and Twitter. Feed is now dominated by adverts, endlessly shared click-bait, repeat content (especially if conspiratorial/shocking/fake - a variation on click bait), and the "you interact with this person sometimes, here's everything they ever do". And begging me to follow Zuckerberg. Compared to a couple…

It would be nice if they could prioritize things by letting the user indicate "I want to see more/less of this stuff" and then build the algorithm based on that. I bet they did their testing on that and realized that users never end up doing that so they're going to try to come up with their own strategy. I agree with you, my feed has really dropped in quality even after blocking clickbaity sources like BuzzFeed and other content farms.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#89

Post by notduncansmith » Mon, May 02, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

karmacondon wrote: post #79

Going to use HN for some quick market research... would anyone be willing to pay for a human curated news feed? Say $10 or $20 a month for someone to go through news sources and pick out the stories that will be interesting to you, and potentially summarize them? I'm thinking of curation based on a personal relationship instead of an algorithm. You would indicate that you're interested in machine learning, libertaria…

That's still an algorithm, you just have humans executing it (and introducing some entropy in the process). Cue Minsky empty-room koan.

Re: The Feed Is Dying

#90

Post by zb » Mon, May 02, 2016, 4:15 PM UTC

md224 wrote: post #21

Jgrubb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the web version go Settings -> Account. Under the "Content" section uncheck "show me the best tweets first". iOS app has a similar setting, and it stays synced with whatever is set there so however you disable it.

I don't know... I unchecked that a while back and I still get annoying "while you were gone..." curated shit. Maybe I have to log out/in or something?

Yeah, unchecking that was the first thing I did after updating the app, and the existence of that option was the only thing that made Twitter tolerable again. But where before I used to read every tweet in my timeline, now I regularly miss tweets because of the 'while you were gone' misfeature (I can tell because I have another device with an older version of the app), which doesn't appear to be optional. Plus everything is out of order.

It's not like I see any more ads this way, so I don't get the point. I do get a lot of stuff that isn't ads but which I didn't subscribe to and don't care about, and it's infuriating. Twitter clearly doesn't want users like me who follow only enough stuff they can actually read. Probably someone's bonus is linked to the average number of accounts followed. It's enough to make me seriously consider not bothering with Twitter any more. I wonder what that would do to their bonus? Facebook already used the same method to successfully drive down my usage of it (and therefore my viewing of ads) by at least an order of magnitude.