
Twitter's rumored algorithmic timeline switch - judgementday
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2016/02/06/twitters-algorithmic-timeline-switch-is-all-your-own-fault/#44f9e43831b6
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rrggrr
Clueless. Twitter has _got_ to start realizing its much more a Wikipedia and
not at all a Facebook. Twitter's journalistic and celebrity users are its ONLY
value, in the same way Wikipedia's editors are its primary value. Focus on
content, incentivizing content and nothing else. Stop treating earnings
misses, user growth, etc. as metrics that require your immediate attention.
_Stay the course and enhance content._ Twitter IS important for discourse,
democracy and transparency. It is still a national and possibly global
treasure.

~~~
sphericalgames
It is nothing like a Wikipedia - you can't edit my tweet for a start.

It is more like a micro blogging platform with an integrated RSS Reader.

My tweets are my blogs entries limited to 140 characters.

Clicking on followers is the same as clicking on subscribe to another blog
RSS.

When I view all my followers tweets, that timeline is exactly like me viewing
all my subscribed RSS in an RSS reader, the only different is you see the
content there and then rather than clicking a link to view the entire story.

Retweets is same as reblog button on a blog.

Reply to a tweet is same as making a comment to a blog post.

As for Facebook I don't have an FB account to know how it functions. I'm
guessing if you think about it long enough it is close to being a blog too
with more bells and whistles. Adding your family/friends is akin to
subscribing to their feed is just like subscribing to RSS on a blog.

~~~
pjc50
Facebook is like that, except it _doesn 't show you all the stuff you've
subscribed to_, and when it does it's out of order.

The relationship between human users and "pages" that don't represent a person
is even stranger, given that "like" means "subscribe to this, but only a few
percentage of subscribers will see posts unless the page owner pays us".

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pjc50
Non-linear timelines ruin one of the unique things about twitter: livetweeting
along with TV events. Massive, sometimes international, kibitzing.

Generally it destroys the idea of twitter as a "conversation" and entrenches
it as a pile of unrelated attention-seeking statements.

~~~
AznHisoka
No it doesn't. People follow events through a hashtag/keyword search not
through their home timeline. If anything Twitter is making their home timeline
more useful now.

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DyslexicAtheist
The reason why I gradually moved to twitter from facebook was the nanny
mentality of facebook and its shitty idea that it knows better than me what I
want to see. Now twitter is becoming like facebook. Linkedin has also switched
to curated timelines (long ago).

It seems the push by product teams to come up with algorithms to boost ad-
sales is stronger than the common sense.

Guess it's time to log off, move on and actually go outside for a change.

~~~
argonaut
Give that Facebook's stock skyrocketed after you left, does that mean
Twitter's stock is going to skyrocket now? (sarcasm)

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Macha
> We are to blame for the change in Twitter. We whine that it hasn’t changed,
> then whine when it does.

Really? Maybe for journalists etc who follow very active places or very large
numbers but I found following 100-150 moderately active users worked pretty
well and haven't heard too many complaints from similar users, except in
response to changes.

Of course users who make a couple of tens of tweets a month and don't follow
brands or pay attention to ads are not very profitable for twitter, so its no
surprise their needs are ignored.

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frik
Oh "great", that "feature" killed Facebook for me (early 2012).

I want to skim through all entries in a linear fashion ordered by date
descending.

Now Twitter want to do the same, that FB did in 2012.

~~~
Spare_account
I have Facebook bookmarked with the following extras on the URL:

[https://www.facebook.com/home.php?m2w&sk=h_chr](https://www.facebook.com/home.php?m2w&sk=h_chr)

m2w forces it to display in desktop mode on my Nexus 5 and sk=h_chr forces the
Newsfeed to display in chronological order.

Presumably Twitter's web page UI would allow for a similar manipulation.

I don't use the FB android app because it inserts ads between Newsfeed
content, as does the mobile Web view. Viewing FB in desktop mode on my mobile
allows me to zoom the middle column (the newsfeed) to the width of my screen,
pushing the advert column to the right, off screen.

I would probably switch away from the twitter app if they made this change.

~~~
frik
It still filters the content, right? You won't see all posts of your friends,
afaik. [that was the bad change in early 2012 after all]

Until the end of 2011, you could read really all posts of your friends incl.
all Farmville, etc posts. The automatics filtering and the automatic inclusion
of certain "featured posts" of friends-of-friends and advertisement is what
destroyed FB for me.

~~~
Spare_account
Yes, I guess it's still curated to some extent but I've clicked on the little
menu for items I don't want to see a while bunch of times now and FB appears
to be doing what I want it to mostly.

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gdulli
Twitter has been my "home" on the web for years for the qualities that made it
unique. Now it's about to go away and that sucks. I've lost favorite
forums/sites before but never anything I valued as much as Twitter.

There's a corollary to the network effect. Once a community reaches its ideal
size and identity it keeps trying to grow and both the influx of more users
and the attempt to chase more users ruins what made it unique and ideal.

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fluxic
Boy golly gee do I ever hate adblock-walled content. Anyone have a way around
it? I've been forced to disable adblock to access content on several sites.

~~~
CharlesW
My process: Right-click + "Open Link in Incognito Window". I see ads, but at
least I don't get "behavior farmed".

(Hrmmm, your note prompted me to find a Chrome plug-in that can do this for me
automagically: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/incognito-
filter/c...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/incognito-
filter/cifilbmpnkjinlkchohdfcpdkmpngiik?hl=en))

~~~
th0br0
Actually, the Chrome incognito mode isn't worth that much...

[https://valve.github.io/fingerprintjs2/](https://valve.github.io/fingerprintjs2/)

Gives me the same fingerprint in my browser & incognito mode.

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walterbell
Will this apply to lists? Please leave lists alone, as a refuge for those who
want a time-based feed.

Even Facebook leaves Groups in peace. Keep the algos for mass-audience feeds.

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Futurebot
Twitter could just make it so the algorithmic timeline is implemented as a
"show me what I missed" feature via a button. Exactly what FB should have
done. Good UX can sidestep this entire issue.

~~~
junto
This is actually a really good idea. It fits to the concept of progressive
enhancement and isn't invasive or forced.

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LinkPlug
#RIPTwitter >
[https://twitter.com/hashtag/RIPTwitter](https://twitter.com/hashtag/RIPTwitter)

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LukeB_UK
Jack Dorsey has stated that they never planned to change it next week:
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968](https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968)

~~~
Twirrim
emphasis on _next week_? What about the week after? Next month?

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brianchu
I don't get the complaints here. Most of the complaints about the algorithmic
timeline are implementation details, not objections to the concept itself.

An algorithmic timeline _does not necessarily mean_ live events are out of
order. There is no reason the algorithm cannot be sophisticated enough to
detect time-sensitive tweets and preserve the ordering of real time events. In
fact, a sophisticated enough algorithm would cluster real time event-related
tweets in chronological batches, and surface relevant replies / commentary
around it.

I'm pretty sure that almost all the people threatening to leave Twitter will
still be there when the dust settles.

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yolesaber
Suppose that the algorithmic timeline is a user discovery disaster akin to
Facebook's. How implausible would a migration to an open source Twitter clone
truly be? The chronological timeline itself isn't that difficult to build so I
could imagine some sort of protocol being written for a Twitter-like service
and then a client - website, app, etc - built on top of it. Twitter is unique
in its position in that it doesn't have any real direct competition and that
could change if it starts stumbling.

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nip
I recently wrote a blog post related to Facebook's content discovery:
"Scrolling through my Facebook feed feels like watching TV"[1].

I didn't expect that Twitter would follow the path of the almighty blackbox
algorithm.

[1] [https://medium.com/@bendersej/scrolling-through-my-
facebook-...](https://medium.com/@bendersej/scrolling-through-my-facebook-
feed-feels-like-watching-tv-4e8428c36bdb#.496o4lrcm)

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soohyung
Apparently it's only a rumor and nothing more.
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968](https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968)

~~~
tshtf
_We never planned to reorder timelines next week._

Jack isn't saying Twitter doesn't intend to use algorithmic timelines in the
future.

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facepalm
What I wish for is an algorithm that can identify topics and allow me to
filter away said topics.

