I recently got the algorithmic timeline for one of my more popular Twitter accounts. The algo has rendered it completely useless - it prioritizes all the wrong stuff and the lack of chronological ordering made it literally impossible to use during the debates. I wanted the sharp minute by minute commentary of my friends and news outlets but instead I was getting memes and dumb retweets from days ago. At least give the users the option to have a full chrono timeline - I can handle the "information overload" just fine on my own TYVM.
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.
While you were gone is different from the algorithmic feed. It's a short section you can easily scroll past to get to the main feed. The algorithmic feed re-sorts the whole thing.
He's talking about the ordering, not the content. Even a carefully curated list of followers will be resulted in a timeline that's destroyed by Twitter's bizarre attempts to drive your attention towards the paid content that's forced on you.
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.
I like the "whiule you were" gone thing. Useful for when I woke up in the morning and it shows me half a dozen overnight tweets. Usually a couple of these are good.
A few months ago the "gone" time got reduced to just a few hours which was a little annoying but survivable. I don't really want to go 100% algorithmic though. If I just wanted to see the popular stuff I'd follow buzzfeed or something.
"While you were gone" breaks completely when it grabs one tweet out of a series of tweets, out of context. And it has far too subtle a break (a tiny bit of vertical whitespace and no new heading) to indicate the end of the "highlights" and the start of the content I actually want.
Sure; and while they're at it, they could get rid of the "reply" button and the notion that people are talking to each other rather than at each other.
Yeah, the main effect of "while you were gone" is just that I have to reload the page twice when it stops updating or when I restart my browser. Dumb and mildly annoying, but only mildly.
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.
It can't be replaced but it can be made easily mutable.
For example, imagine a quick-switcher that flips the feed from algorithmic to time based with a single tap. That's a powerful feature and adapts twitter to different use-cases fast.
I think the key here is to give users options instead of trying to shepard them into a particular direction, especially with their bipolar userbase (e.g. people use Twitter for various, seemingly disjoint use cases)
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 destroyed it.
Live data is their product, but they bury it with stupid business decisions; utterly baffling. They tout MAUs during their conference calls (which they always miss), but that has nothing to do with their product. Their product has some of the top content providers, providing unique content in real time. Facebook can't say that, no other platform sans Snapchat can say that. Facebook has figured this out and that's why they are rolling out offerings like Paper. Twitter doesn't get it.
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.
I still browse the homepage, even with the need to switch it back to most recent every other day when they try to sneak you back onto algorithmogeddoen.
I completely agree with you on all counts. Why they forced the algo as a default is a mystery to me.
I mean...the old Discover tab was fantastic and if they filtered that with their new algos, then I think people would love the result! Instead we get a static list of top news (Moments) that you can find on Yahoo's homepage.
At a guess, they want to be able to charge companies to reach the people that are following them on Twitter just like Facebook does and they can't easily do that with reverse-chronological.
That's sort of the usual explanation: Shareholders see that Facebook is more popular and profitable than Twitter, hence they put pressure on Twitter to be more like Facebook. The problem being of course that no one needs a second Facebook.
Maybe, it's too early to tell. The thing is that Facebook has to convince content providers to do it...Twitter already has them doing it; they just don't seem to know the value. Facebook is for sharing links, to me that's a lot less valuable than original content in the space (per user).
I'm not saying Twitter should be worth more than Facebook, only that their core component is undervalued, but Twitter seems keen on killing it because they are trying to focus on meaningless stats like MAUs, which have only a small importance to do with what their model should be.
If Twitter were under someone who saw it as an information company instead of a social media platform, imo, it would be a steal of a company at the current market price...unfortunately Jack and his team are incompetent.
I say fuck both of them. How long are we going to let companies being directed by people who want more money keep building software we can't stop using and causes us more suffering than the last version?
Wall Street, Jack and their like promise things like "connect with friends" but it's really "look at content that makes us money". The worst part? We helped them do it to ourselves.
It's time to think differently about infrastructure software, including social media sites. We can do better, and we can do it in a way that makes all our lives richer, not just the founders and investors.
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 of years ago it seems boring and shallow.
FB is particularly bad, but partly seems my friends are part of the problem (and/or click bait is hugely on the rise; it works). Twitter maybe a bit less so, but this out-of-sequence stuff is terrible. Also miss the early Twitter days when I found interesting randoms to follow from the public firehose, now all celebrity focussed.
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.
When users don't own their technology, they get jerked around by whoever does until they jump ship for greener pastures.
You can claim the market will solve this (users will sell their time and speech to a higher bidder, now that Twitter's prices no longer seem competitive), but if people were empowered to have their computers do what they want, it never would have happened in the first place.
For $1000 and $30 a month, anybody in the world could hire someone to setup and maintain a personal email server.
Of course being user owned, by definition users should be allowed to outsource their email service to large companies, and they do, because it's a lot cheaper that way.
But an email server they own themselves, with their own rules, own display preferences, compatible with billions of other email accounts, is well within their reach. And millions of people do just that.
Nobody is arguing that you can't set up your own system. You can build your own version of fb/twt etc... if you wanted.
The distinction is that 99.9% of consumers and an increasing number of organizations don't want to do it in house and would rather let someone else do it.
Again, it's not about capability, it's about what people actually are doing.
However, with gmail filtering out email from untrusted domains, you could argue that you actually can't build an email host that can send emails to all of your friends.
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.
The market can't solve anything if the product is free. Users aren't voting with their wallet.
Twitter (and other dominant free products like Facebook) will behave the way our overlords want them to behave. Consumers have surrendered the free market. Capitalism is only played behind the scenes.
>The market can't solve anything if the product is free
It can absolutely work. The product is not free. The product is our attention and internet services (Twitter/Google/Facebook) are competing for that limited supply of attention in order to sell it on to their advertising customers. We won't give our attention to them for free though, so they have to buy it by providing a service we want. If they don't provide an attractive enough service, we turn around and sell our attention to someone else. That's how this market works.
I agree that there is a free market effect with how we sell our attention. Certainly this works well enough for TV, as ad-supported content is quite competitive with paid content.
Perhaps the problem arises when the product is not only free but also a virtual monopoly. Changing the TV channel is easy. Changing to a Twitter alternative is not. As consumers, we get to choose between an 80% Twitter or no Twitter at all.
Twitter rolled out the algorithmic TL to my account the other day. Of the first 12 tweets on my TL, 8 were really badly targeted ads,[1] and the other four was one of my friends liveblogging a TV show I don't care about. Twitter shuffled the order of her tweets in doing so, of course.
The promise is that algorithmic TL will show you the best organic tweets, and relevant ads. In practice, the ads are trash and the organic tweets are just as bad as usual, but in the wrong order.
1: Diapers, cars. I don't have kids, and while I've been looking at cars, I sure as hell won't buy a new one.
Inevitably there will be too much content to digest, though. At that point we might create services that offer smaller "blogs," with limited-length content. Maybe call them "microblogs."
This would work but in this case the "bloggers" (who curates the feed) doesn't create the content. There is still blog, bloggers (creating content), and the thing that curates the content.
I follow quite a number of people more for what they select than what they say. So we could call it Twitter, and the people who curate could be called "retweeters".
A feed is a feed. It doesn't matter how it's created. There is utility to the chronological feed as there is the the algorithmic.
Curation has been happening for a very long time. The problem is that it's not enough even to curate.
For those who experience the problem, the issue really is that they have so much information of potential relevance but still can't read more than one feed item at a time (unless it's just pictures)
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.
>Unfortunately, chronological order doesn’t scale well.
True, I guess, but what if my feed is already curated, by me. Facebook, for instance is annoying to use, because it can't seem to remember that I just want everything, in chronological order. I don't have a ton a people on Facebook, nor do I care to, but I do want to see everything these people post. It won't amount to more than 30 minutes of content a week anyway.
If you had to enable "curated feed", would you turn it on? For most people, even those who have a large number friends or follow a ton of people/companies, I suspect the answer would be no.
The other thing about the transformation of my Twitter feed is it is now mostly oriented toward images - photos, dancing GIFs, videos, or logos associated with accounts being retweeted.
Sometimes the people I follow append the images, but most of the time Twitter attaches the images to individual tweets or RTs. It's possible to disable most of the images on my phone (via the Twitter app settings), but on the Web the images cannot be stopped. Even if autoplay videos are disabled, the preview image will still show up.
It's irritating and lowers the value of the feed I have created on Twitter. Most of the time I just want to read opinions or retweets of the people I follow without an image or logo getting in my way.
I see two big problems with algorithmic/curated feeds:
* conflict of interest between reader and (algo) curator. FB (as an example) wants reader to stay as long as possible on its site and to make the reader to regular comeback to FB, including preferring by the reader FB and not others. This is done by (algo) curator playing with our dopamine levels (read novelty seeking preference of human brains) presenting things which create 1 (stay) and 2 (comeback). In fact feed is curated based only on 1 and 2 with constantly run A/B experiments by FB. This is WRONG to reader.
* all this 'feeling connected' being 'within circle of similar to you people' etc, puts you in a closed circle of opinions/views. This cramps critical thinking of the reader. Whats' more dangerous, it distorts (humans are really weak on this) our view how world is composed. We see too much of sth, and dont see (curator removed them) things we don't agree with. We conclude how world is constructed (e.g. everybody supports some presidency candidate, because 80% of "likes" and "shares" in my stream are about him (concluded by curator because I clicked on some of them). This has WRONG influence on our learning and critical thinking and forms untrue perception of world impairing our reasoning.
There is a giant possible Game Of Thrones spoiler from last night's episode in the image of this article. Be warned. I haven't watched the episode yet but now I'm rather annoyed.
I think there is a place for both chronological and personalized feeds. Chronological works well if the realtime component is absolutely essential to your app. For apps that have a lot of content or users visiting infrequently you will often want to show the best content, not the latest content. That's where the personalized feeds come in.
I believe Twitter and Instagram are doing this because the chronological feeds don't work well for a large portion of their users. You do wonder why they don't disable it for their most active users. (why try to reorder something if the user sees it all anyway?)
We provide both chronological, ranked and personalized feeds over at getstream.io
Demand for personalized feeds is definitely picking up rapidly, also among smaller apps.
It'd be nice if there was any form of data to support the position of the article. I know that among my non-technical friends there seems to be no worry about algo feed vs time-based feed - and there doesn't seem to be any slow down in their scrolls through their Facebook/Instagram/Twitter feeds. I get wanting to call a change, but lacking any data it's hard to take seriously.
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, libertarian politics and cooking (or whatever), and people would check hn, new york times, etc and compile lists of those items. I know it's not the same thing as this post, but it's a problem and I'm wondering if anyone else feels it strongly enough to pay for a solution.
I personally have unsubscribed as I favor RSS feeds, but I recommend them highly for people looking for someone else to weed through the crap for you. He does a great job.
I don't think he's begun charging yet. I wouldn't pay. I suspect he could get a decent niche to pay though.
This is get for having psych majors optimize the feed for an optimal mix of reward/stale to achieve maximum addictivity. Skinner box, now available in Facebook
How about time being the best curator? I see what is live. I have a choice to see the past by scrolling back. I can't see the future, well for obvious reasons. For news/event based content, chronological is the best bet, IMHO. For content of archival value, one can apply various curation techniques. So the assertion that the feed is dying is wrong. It can't and it won't.
I wish services would be clearer with how much of content the user I follow produces on average. Let's say, I consume 1000 tweets per day on average, therefore I shouldn't follow someone who produces 500 tweets per day, and really think about following someone with 100 tweets per day.
I actually get confused when I see something on Facebook which has been posted three days ago. Also I'm not really sure Facebook knows what I want to read. There is no "I don't want to read those posts right now" button.
What's even better is that I've almost always seen the 3 day old post (and often even liked it) 3 days ago, but it's apparently still the "most relevant" thing for me to see. I do wonder if I'd appreciate the algorithmic model better if the algorithms weren't just so damn bad
My social medium of choice is, despite my many and loud gripes about it, Google+. It's not even nearly awesome (none of the major options are), but, for a while at least, it offered two compelling features.
The first is Notifications. Action on your own posts, posts with which you've interacted, and (selected) people mentioning you, will show up in your Notifications list (which ought be a stream in its own right). This is, if you think about it, one of the highest possible signifiers of relevance: something you've already indicated an interest in in which others are interacting, often directly with you.
The other was Search. After a couple of years, even the vast wasteland of G+ had accumulated a catalog of interesting posts, and via Search those could be found. Search was always a bastard child, and it's considerably worse now than it had been for a long time, but given a keyword signifier, it would, sometimes, return relevant content.
I actually wrote a really embarassing mash note to G+ management -- Vic and the project's then product manager -- highlighting this.
The response of Google was, of course, to kill both features, or attempt to do so valiently.
The problem with the algorithm is that at best it can guess or assume intent. But it never fucking bothers to ask you directly, or to allow you to indicate your preferences.
I've likened this to a good salesperson. These exist, and I've on occasion, despite my anti-commercial tendencies, encountered and appreciated them. The good one will size you up as you enter a store, compose a good idea of what you're looking for, consider elements (say size or measurements for clothing), and match these with stock. Then they'll ask you what you're looking for. They'll return with a selection of items and, often, a few others. They'll read your responses, even subtle, on what's been offered and take a "no" as a "no".
That is the one feature that is missing from virtually all current electronic information interfaces. I wanted, an hour or so back, to tell Amazon to show me only books published matching a subject from 1990-1999. Actually, filtering by cover colour would also have been useful. No can do.
For media streams, the thing I most want to do is filter crap. Again, G+ offers no such capabilities. There are websites I never want to see (say, WSJ at HN), topics or people I don't care to hear about, etc. The best option I've got is to uncircle or block crap, which actually works quite well. But finer controls would be hugely useful.
Twitter's experiment seems to be headed the same way. And it's not going to work.
I've seen a lot of this recently yet I find myself using and enjoying Twitter and RSS more than ever, not saying it's wrong - but it is an interesting outlier if correct en mass.
This is not news. We feeble humans cannot continue to drink from the ever-growing reverse-chronological firehose. Algorithms will only get better. Progress marches on.
Topic hierarchy involving either vote based sorting, temporal sorting, or personal relevance sorting. e.g. forum -> subforum -> thread; HN's comment system.
You can extend it to allow multiple topic parents via a tagging system, but this usually seems to complicate things.
facebook has wall -> post -> comments, but could add richer hierarchy above post
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.
