
Twitter is monkeying with the order of tweets in timelines - qzervaas
http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/twitter-is-monkeying-around-with-the-order-of-tweets-in-your-timeline/
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This breaks the main purpose of Twitter to me, seeing content in the order it
was posted, not some sorting algorithm that decides what Tweets are more
important to me. This is a show stopper for me.

~~~
EC1
Deleted my FB and Twatter for this reason. I don't understand why someone
can't just build a simple product and leave it be.

~~~
stdbrouw
Don't confuse yourself with the average user. Facebook and Twitter go where
their tests and metrics tell them to go. If an algorithm that highlights
important content and hides stuff you probably don't care about makes the
average user come back to the platform more often, Facebook would be a fool
not to grab that opportunity.

~~~
bad_user
Zynga has been driven by metrics too, their strategy being to exploit human
psychology in order to get people addicted and to pay money for in-game
purchases. There's a whole science behind it. Basically those games feed the
people's compulsion for completing tasks in return for some reward, with an
ever present illusion that the game might get fun after you gain some
experience or virtual coin. And the interesting part is that fun is
antithetical to the company's purpose, because if the game is too much fun,
then people aren't inclined to pay. And in 2010 Zynga was on a roll,
predicting doom for the gaming industry as we knew it, yet look at where they
are now.

In other words, that mythical algorithm for Facebook's feed that you're
describing is probably not about making people happy or serving their
interests. I used to like Facebook, but my stream is getting worse and worse
as I see more and more pictures of babies of strangers in my news feed,
related to what my "friends" "liked", not to mention being exposed to opinions
so stupid that I lose faith in mankind. There's no way of stopping this stream
of things from strangers that I don't want. And their analysis of my
preferences seems to be completely useless, as I keep getting news items on
subjects I'm actively deleting from my stream, but who knows, maybe this
algorithm is trying hard to elicit an emotional response from me.

By Facebook's metrics I'm more active than ever. Heck, if HN had metrics it
would count me as a satisfied member judging by the intense activity I'm
having. Count the words in this comment, this is what true engagement looks
like. Yet I'm more dissatisfied than ever. And in particular for Facebook,
just as with its symbiotic partner Zynga, I'm predicting a future in which
people will realize that Facebook is not making them happy. I know I have, my
account being currently deactivated, in what I call a trial separation,
pending deletion.

Also, in case you're going to say that I'm not the target demographic, well
that's what people said about Google+, the nymwars and forcing YouTube users
to join, with Google+ being exactly what you get when you bring in Facebook's
crap without having a network effect.

~~~
Terr_
With all the advertising and marketing and addictive-behavior stuff these
days, I've been struggling to think of some way to make "psychological self-
defense" profitable and honestly-effective, but so far it seems all the money
is in exploiting people.

Imagine a little chip you could tuck into a hat-band that would detect the "I
can't pass up a bargain this good" mental pattern. Then your phone dings and
reminds you what _other_ things you had already planned as priorities.

At that point I'd probably suddenly suffer from a few dozen "self inflicted"
stab wounds from sharpened credit-cards in a dark alley.

------
brohoolio
The ordering is the primary reason I stopped using Facebook and started to use
Twitter. I understand they need to change things up but I really like reading
everything in order. Once I'm done scrolling through the content I'm done. I
don't miss things.

~~~
eli
My guess is the twitter users who read every tweet in their feed are a small
minority.

~~~
baddox
I appreciate the "While You Were Out" section at the top of my Twitter feed,
but I'd still prefer the main timeline to be strictly chronological.

~~~
DougWebb
I hate the fact that no matter how many times I click the "I don't like this"
button after closing "While you were out", it keeps coming back.

~~~
prawn
Surely that is killing good will with established users? I have seen that a
dozen times and cancelled it, then voted No, I didn't like it. Still comes
back again and again.

------
janvdberg
Just bring back the 'Activity' or 'Discover' feed. They were perfect additions
to spend more time on Twitter (and discover new things). And that's what this
is about, right?

I recently wrote this: " I worry that a lot of (young) people seem to hit
every follow button they come across, after which their Twitter timeline
becomes an uncontrollable mess (bots with 100’s of tweets/day) to which they
never return. Too much hassle. I’m very selective who to follow and to keep a
readable timeline. Again: this is me. But it is part of a larger problem on
Twitter to create a better experience where the better content sticks out
more. Snapchat specifically and probably incidentally deals with this problem.
Stuff is just gone after a certain period."

~~~
xemoka
Maybe they could fix lists or better integrate them into the UI (make it
easier to add people to different lists, under the follow button or
something)... I wish I could categorise the people I follow better.

~~~
npongratz
I use Tweetdeck [0] to present stuff in categories. It works for me, but to be
fair, my needs are quite simplistic.

[0] [https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/](https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/)

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walterbell
Dear Twitter, please retain real-time properties in a subset of the platform,
e.g. lists. If content is not being read in real time, it is less likely to be
posted in real time. Today, there is unique and timely content on Twitter,
unavailable elsewhere. If that original content is lost, Twitter will subside
into the churning sea of republishers.

------
gdulli
> Some are calling it the "Facebooking of Twitter."

Ugh. Twitter was like my home. Because it was the opposite of Facebook. It was
its own unique thing. Its own unique culture. And now that's slowly going
away. It's not like this is the first sign of it, it's just still painful to
see each successive step.

When I left Facebook it wasn't painful because I had never liked it much, it
had never been my home. This one is painful.

~~~
derefr
For-profit companies are driven away from being their "own unique thing" by an
urge to capture the audience of their competitors by, basically, being their
thing as well. Facebook wants to be Facebook+Twitter, and Twitter wants to be
Facebook+Twitter. It's kind of silly.

You know, I used to think (contrary to some) that Facebook and Twitter and the
like _weren 't_ going to go away—they had achieved such network-effect
saturation that people are now completely locked in, in a way they weren't
with previous networks. I also thought that, despite "kids these days"
preferring services like Instagram or Snapchat at a young age (and HN
soothsaying doom for the incumbents as a result), the next generation would
all end up "growing up into" Facebook et al when they hit the right age-range
to care about keeping in contact with family in college &c.

However, I didn't stop to consider that all these networks are effectively
trying to modify their features until they all are basically the same
thing—and thus, in est, commodities. Any social network you look at nowadays
has:

• a pseudo-timeline of prioritized microblog feeds, with inline image/video
posts and comment chains;

• the option to "follow" people (where "friending" people is just mutual
"following");

• "liking" posts and copying posts onto your own microblog for your
friends+followers to see;

• conversations conducted "in public" by posting back and forth on your own
feeds, expecting people to follow both you and the people you talk to to get
the whole conversation;

And so forth. It's all the same.

At this point, we need a Trillian/Pidgin for social networks—I actually don't
care whether a post comes from Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or Vine or
Instagram or _wherever_ ; they're all just gloss on a collection-of-feeds API
with a few verbs (like, share, post).

I'm honestly surprised no RSS-reader app has jumped on the "social networks
are just RSS-reader-like services with more verbs" idea; it'd be perfect for
an app like Reeder that already plugs into a ton of private APIs like
Feedly/NewsBlur/etc.

~~~
dragonwriter
Conversely, every for-profit company wants to be its own unique thing -- i.e.,
a monopoly which can extract monopoly rents. When you aren't unique, you're a
commodity competing on price.

EDIT:

> However, I didn't stop to consider that all these networks are effectively
> trying to modify their features until they all are basically the same
> thing—and thus, in est, commodities.

They aren't trying to become commodities; the are trying to duplicate the
features of the currently-most-popular social networking service (and thus
commoditize _that_ service) while adding their own unique and distinguishing
features on top of that (thus avoiding _being_ a commodity themselves.)

------
acdha
Dear Twitter: your business model should be charging me $1/month for a useful
service. No company has been successful trying to annoy their users into
profitability.

~~~
rco8786
App.net and Facebook are both waving hello for different reasons.

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eli
I'm OK with this. I end up unfollowing people entirely because they sometimes
tweet too frequently and blow up my feed and I think this might fix that.

~~~
frostmatthew
If you want to easily/quickly see how frequently someone tweets _before_
following them a small side project of mine shows that
[https://www.shouldifollow.com/](https://www.shouldifollow.com/)

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logn
I don't think the problem is reading tweets. It's in getting followers and how
tweets you create are acknowledged.

You are a tree falling and no one is around to hear it. There is a lack of
interaction unless you're a celebrity, have outside friends on there, or spent
some effort in gaining followers. They need to find ways to break users into
small groups who can interact with each other (pretty much the entire appeal
of IRC).

~~~
evancordell
To me that seems an especially profound analysis. It aligns with my experience
very well.

I can't figure out a good way to use Twitter. Follow celebrities? Seems cool
at first but as much as I like Steven Fry's work, his hourly musings don't add
much to my life. Coordinate with friends? Why wouldn't I just text? Keep up
with news in areas that interest me? Hacker news and Reddit cover they pretty
soundly, and it's much easier to read and participate in discussion. Perhaps
professional networking is where it would shine, but emails and mailing lists
feel like a better fit to me.

I keep an account because I hear it's good for building that "personal brand"
that I think I'm supposed to build at some point.

------
JeremyMorgan
Change for the sake of change. It's a core selling point for me as the
chronological order is very important, especially for some of my lists. But
I'm not the average user. I get the fact that they're trying to monetize this
thing, but there should be a better way. Even "normals" hate the Facebook algo
so why make the same mistake?

------
rmason
I don't mind at all Twitter throwing stuff at the wall to get more engagement.
Just leave the option for its current users to turn it all off.

Otherwise they run the risk of annoying or driving away their strongest
supporters in a failed attempt to get new ones.

~~~
krstck
Agreed. Facebook's great sin isn't that they have an algorithm to serve the
content they believe is the best, it's that _they don 't respect my decision
to turn that off_.

~~~
rmason
I've often wondered why Facebook doesn't let me white list my closest friends
so that I see every one of their posts. It defeats the very purpose of
Facebook. Know that I'd spend more time there if they did.

------
dcpdx
I wrote an opinion on what I think Twitter could become
([https://medium.com/@danclay/how-twitter-could-become-the-
ube...](https://medium.com/@danclay/how-twitter-could-become-the-uber-of-the-
news-industry-e5891c64456a#.ecggiqoke)), before I learned that Facebook is
essentially doing the exact same thing with its Instant Articles. I think this
will be the nail in the coffin for Twitter becoming anything more than a niche
service for techies, celebrities, and thought leaders. Facebook is making big
moves in the news space, and if they're able to beat Twitter at their own game
of real-time, it's game over. Moments is a start, but it may be too little too
late. Perhaps it's time to pull a Foursquare and separate the traditional feed
with a much more robust version of Moments into separate apps to try and gain
a lead in real-time, but that'd be a hell of a Hail Mary. Twitter has a lot of
good people and it's a shame to see them become a zombie in the tech space
after so much early promise.

------
mahouse
>I’ve been told by insiders at Twitter that “nothing is sacred” when it comes
to making Twitter “easier to use” and ready to onboard the next few hundred
million users that Twitter needs to be a powerhouse in media.

I sincerely hope they never, ever make that "few hundred million users" they
want to do. Let them sink. I have absolutely no respect for the product people
at Twitter, which is the same respect they are showing for us the power users.

Every update to their app has me shaking, wondering how they will annoy me.
The reason I liked Twitter was its goddamn simplicity, Jesus. I remember the
good old days, scrolling over my tweets on twicca. Why did they have to ruin
it all?

~~~
teaneedz
I couldn't have said it better mahouse! I'm giving Twitter, one tweet a week
now and have now moved the Ello app to my dock. I'm getting prepared to stop
tweeting completely.

------
billjings
God, I am so tired of all this.

The things these companies build are inscrutable. Building your own community
with these tools with your own values is impossible.

I'm sure they have their reasons, but what I wouldn't give for some stable
infrastructure. Far too much ego in these services, far too little service.

That's the point of a service, right? To do what someone else needs, not what
you think they need?

Sigh. I'm sure I'll perk up in a day or two, but these companies only seem to
help me out when our interests are aligned. Why I should expect anything else,
I don't know. But it saddens me all the same.

------
sbarre
I've noticed this as well, with tweets "vanishing" (I thought they had been
deleted or something) but then appearing elsewhere.

I'm all fine with them doing this _as long as I can turn it off_.

~~~
awqrre
it would be fine if that feature would default to off

------
marshray
I spent years on Twitter having both friendly and professional discussions. I
loved the IRC-like nature of it, and for years I put up with trying and
failing to understand their ever-changing rules about who would see what
tweets and when.

Changing retroactively the stars to hearts was a small thing, but it was the
final straw for me. I haven't logged in in months. This news only justifies my
decision. Clearly they won't ever stop editing and curating the message
stream.

Let them go the way of Orkut and Myspace.

It was fun while it lasted.

------
egypturnash
Out-of order posts are one of the reasons I hate Facebook. Ugh.

I'm glad I do all my interaction with Twitter via Tweetbot, so I never have to
see things like this or "Moments".

~~~
teaneedz
Tweetbot rocks! However, I just moved it out of my dock and replaced it with
the Ello app tonight. If Twitter fails to come to its UX senses, I will stop
supporting it even from a 3rd party client - especially when Ello is building
something that really respects users.

------
danso
I recently opened Facebook for the first time on the Web and was surprised to
see this:

[http://imgur.com/ZUEFmEf](http://imgur.com/ZUEFmEf)

Facebook lists have been around for awhile, but they -- as far as I can tell
-- dropped out because FB's algorithm is generally pretty good in terms of
determining who your "Close Friends" are without you manually curating it. And
yet here we are near 2016, and FB apparently still thinks there's use in it (I
have no idea why, but FB's UI/UX/data science team probably know what they're
doing).

In contrast, lists are the only way that Twitter offers users to filter and
curate their timeline intelligently, other than just unfollowing people which
has always been an annoyingly manual process. And yet as far as I can tell,
Twitter has done nothing to make the UI/UX for lists more appealing or usable,
including Tweetdeck's feature of viewing lists side-by-side (in the news
industry, using Tweetdeck and its multi-list-view has been the surefire way to
make even the most skeptical Luddite understand the power of Twitter).

In fact Twitter has done the exact opposite of making Lists more usable...with
each redesign of the mobile app, the button gets more and more
buried...currently, to get to my own set of lists, I have to click the Gear
button, then View Lists, then scroll through the barebones UI to get to a
particular list. Meanwhile, the button for Switch Accounts is front-and-center
in the iOS Twitter app (next to Edit profile)...I realize not every Twitter
user uses Lists...but I bet far, far, _far_ fewer maintain multiple accounts
and need a button to do a quick-switch (the exception are social media
managers, but maybe I'm underestimating how much of Twitter's total audience
is made up by social-media-professionals).

Meanwhile, it seems like the Twitter UI/UX team is undergoing a massive
identity crisis and internal political struggle for power. A few days ago, I
noticed that I was on the Twitter Moments page more often in a 30min period
than I had visited in the entire last month. It's because they switched
Moments to be where "Notifications", making the Moments tab more prominent at
the cost of the Notifications tab...even though the Moments tab is still hand-
curated and glacially slow to update with current events. It reminded me of
Darius Kazemi's classic redesign of pop-up ads:

[http://twitter.com/tinysubversions/status/604380619393531904...](http://twitter.com/tinysubversions/status/604380619393531904/photo/1)

------
ibarreto
I'm OK if they have an approach where they highlight tweets relevant/important
to me. A lot of the time my timeline is polluted with people saying and
repeating the same things, so it's a bit hard to follow. So, in the event
there are some breaking news, having all those very similar tweets "grouped"
would be very helpful.

------
Splendor
This convinced me to sell my remaining stock in Twitter. I've been holding out
hope that we'd see a return-to-roots focus on what made Twitter great in the
early days (an open platform that embraced user-driven innovation). The
willingness to experiment with this change indicates to me that they've lost
that thread.

~~~
teaneedz
It's convinced me that they either lack a UX team with any real power or
simply don't get it at all.

------
alkonaut
The tweets are tagged with time stamps so when the client displays them it
should sort them in chronological order if you want to. One can imagine other
orders such as relevance. If your Twitter client doesn't work the way you
want, switch to another client.

~~~
Cakez0r
Paging would make that impossible even on the client side, unless their API
continues to return tweets in chronological order.

------
delecti
I almost exclusively use a non-official mobile app to access Twitter. It
doesn't seem to have been affected by their "Facebooking" changes, but I
wonder how long until that shoe drops.

------
tomashertus
And this is how it ends....

------
AshFurrow
Clown town.

------
ManFromUranus
This is probably a precursor to "Sponsored Tweets" appearing in whatever view
you are looking at (I don't have a twitter account, so I don't know much about
it). So this is the run-up to injecting advertising, similar to how gmail does
it. That is my guess as to the purpose of this.

~~~
rco8786
You should have a twitter account. They've been doing sponsored/injected
tweets for many years.

