I find myself consistently wondering why I pay money for a third party client five years into my use of Twitter (I was late to the party).
What's more is that Twitter knows what I follow, what I read, what I like, and what I retweet. So why is it still suggesting I follow pop celebrities instead of well known developers? It seems that despite everything they know about me, they don't know me at all.
Moments is a prime example of how out of touch Twitter is. I've clicked on it three times to see, and each time the stories are celebrities or sports. They know enough about who I follow, what I tweet about and the hashtags that come up to target enterprise technology ads to me, why can't they use the same data to customize that page? It's utterly useless in its current form.
Useless to you, but you're probably not in the target demographic for the feature.
Moments is about lowering the bar to new users of Twitter (the discovery problem) and get existing users more engaged in sharing content so Twitter is more valuable to them.
For those users, celebrities and sports is exactly what's going to draw them in. Twitter can then sell ads against those users.
I'd be surprised if it had any kind of algorithmic targeting any time soon, or if enterprise tech firms were looking to get involved in producing native Moments content in any serious numbers.
Before Moments there used to be a tab that showed you tweets that your followers were replying to. I used to use that all the time to find new people to follow.
Way back in the beginning, when you followed someone you got all their tweets - including replies to people you don't follow.
Then they made it an option to not get these, then they took away that option and made it mandatory.
This, plus their really terrible behavior towards developers (still going on, as evidenced by their continuance of the 100K tokens limit per app) has seen me basicly stop using the service entirely.
Especially when compared to Facebook's news sidebar. When it came out I remember it was similar to moments, lots of celeb and sports news. Now it knows only to show me politics and gaming news.
That. And GP. And this is exactly the reason why I don't believe a single word in all the stuff about AI and deep blabla. If Facebook cannot suggest better news, it's because it's most probably impossible to simulate how my best friend did suggest me to watch les combatants (a French movie I loved). Neither the casting, the director (all unknown) or the theme (a young guy going to army training to follow a girl) or any other objective feature of the movie could have helped. It's done purely on feeling, intimate knowledge of our respective tastes, long time friendship (30 years). In a word, alchemy. That's just not going to be modelized any time soon or later.
The only thing I get from suggestions are either dim variants of the things I already liked, or random stuff high on popularity charts.
which sadly does not work anymore as I gave up on the several API changes.
The beauty was that I could search (and memorize) any hashtag I liked and then sorted this by retweets AND if I was away for holidays I came back and see only these newer tweets and have those sorted again by retweets.
Also sorting your timeline by retweets is really powerful.
This way you do not waste time to discover things and you do not need to trust an algorithm to find something interesting (although I loved getprismatic.com and like http://tweetedtimes.com/) but I can actively search for stuff
I also tried to combined hackernews in the mix to find more stuff outside of my follower set and e.g. find people to follow but also have the possibility to sort hackernews by XY AND filter by my topic which I still really miss here too :)
There was also a nice feature to find the first tweet of a certain link/tweet to learn which people really post 'hot stuff' and which just copy things.
What's more is that Twitter knows what I follow, what I read, what I like, and what I retweet. So why is it still suggesting I follow pop celebrities instead of well known developers? It seems that despite everything they know about me, they don't know me at all.