Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
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Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
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Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#2Roulettes aren't useless though
Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#3Roulettes aren't useless though
Much like a roulette, in Twitter the house always wins.
Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#4this is news? social media and promotion algorithms have always been attention roulette for ad dollars, and nothing in that ecosystem has a knowledge of "meaning", just engagement through statistics.
Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#5So I have never really used twitter much and I don't think I even signed up for it ever. But I want to double check something -- is it the case now, as this post suggests, that if you follow somebody, you do not see their posts? Isn't that the main purpose for the follow function?
Why would you do that? Why would you have a follow function and break it? And what else do you show people? I mean if your user follows someone, then it is what they want to see, why wouldn't you show them what they want to see?
Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#6"Now"?
Limiting outbound reach was, insanely, a deliberate decision by the new mismanagement.
Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#7[deleted]
Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#8So I have never really used twitter much and I don't think I even signed up for it ever. But I want to double check something -- is it the case now, as this post suggests, that if you follow somebody, you do not see their posts? Isn't that the main purpose for the follow function? Why would you do that? Why would you have a follow function and break it? And what else do you show people? I mean if your user follows so…
If you follow someone you're still more likely to see their posts. You just see other stuff too in the "For You". It's algorithmic, and at times annoying - but contrary to the article is still very valuable in my experience.
I would say twitter stays about 1.5 months ahead of every other site I know of on AI news in particular. I've usually had time to demo new tools for quite a while before hearing about them on HN or elsewhere.
Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#9So I have never really used twitter much and I don't think I even signed up for it ever. But I want to double check something -- is it the case now, as this post suggests, that if you follow somebody, you do not see their posts? Isn't that the main purpose for the follow function? Why would you do that? Why would you have a follow function and break it? And what else do you show people? I mean if your user follows so…
The basic premise with algorithmic feeds is that users are lazy and don't do a lot of active discovery, so their follow lists tend to be pretty small. The algorithm can show them a mix of content where some of it is sourced from their existing follow/like graph (e.g. followed by someone you follow) and therefore likely to be interesting, and some is pushed on other less user-centric grounds. (E.g. in Twitter's case: "The CEO wants to be popular, so everyone sees his posts.")
Ideally the user is happy to discover new content that both complements their existing interests and occasionally introduces them to something new and exciting, while the company is happy to have an algorithmic lever that helps with ad placement. This theoretical win-win ideal may not get realized very often in practice...
Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless
#10So I have never really used twitter much and I don't think I even signed up for it ever. But I want to double check something -- is it the case now, as this post suggests, that if you follow somebody, you do not see their posts? Isn't that the main purpose for the follow function? Why would you do that? Why would you have a follow function and break it? And what else do you show people? I mean if your user follows so…
The basic premise with algorithmic feeds is that users are lazy and don't do a lot of active discovery, so their follow lists tend to be pretty small. The algorithm can show them a mix of content where some of it is sourced from their existing follow/like graph (e.g. followed by someone you follow) and therefore likely to be interesting, and some is pushed on other less user-centric grounds. (E.g. in Twitter's case:…
Ok but that does not explain why you would actively remove content from their follow graphs. Sure, perhaps you can use the follow graphs to see what other stuff the user might be interested in and serve that, but why actively prevent the user from seeing posts that he has explicitly said he wants to see?