
Jack Dorsey: “We never planned to reorder timelines next week.” - minimaxir
https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968
======
gdulli
It's still happening.

"The Verge spoke to two users who have been testing the new timeline for a few
months. Neither particularly liked it. "I started to get used to it but I
still think that it is a terrible idea," Twitter user Robin Bonny told me. "It
tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have
been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my
timeline. It makes it extremely hard to follow events, and destroys one of the
core values of Twitter, in my opinion." Another user, Coady DiBiase, was only
slightly more positive. "It's definitely nice in terms of catching up on
things I might've missed, but it's a departure from the core idea of Twitter,
so overall it complicates things.""

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10927874/twitter-
algorithmi...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10927874/twitter-algorithmic-
timeline)

~~~
AznHisoka
If you follow events you're most likely searching for it through a keyword or
hashtags not following it in your timeline. Searches right now have a "live"
option which is chronological order. Very few people should follow live events
or live chats through their home timeline.

~~~
askafriend
I definitely use my timeline to get a _pulse_ of what's going on in the world
from the people I follow. I want to hear what's on _their_ mind specifically.
I use search or hashtags sometimes, but more often than not I'm just looking
through my feed and if I feel the need to dig deeper, I use search/hashtags.
So yes, I do follow live events through my home timeline.

It's important to note that I follow accounts like @NBA or @Warriors which
predictably tweets during important live moments so I often get exactly what
I'm looking for. It all depends on who you follow. I've curated my follow list
to be perfect for my usage, so it works well for me. It really all depends on
how you've curated your follow list, so I can see why you might think that
people rarely follow live events from their feed, but I just don't think
that's entirely true (of course, neither of us have the numbers to back either
of our claims so we are merely speculating).

Example: Warriors game is on. I fire up Twitter and look through my home feed
and I get tweets from @Warriors play by play interspersed with reactions from
other accounts that I follow like Bill Simmons or certain players or
celebrities. It's a predictable experience that way and doesn't require
search.

~~~
viscanti
Hashtags might be great for following along live with an event, but the
discoverability is low if you can't see it already on your timeline. I find
most hashtags through seeing a number of the people that I follow already
using them.

------
pg_bot
I use twitter daily, and it strikes me as a piece of software that is "done"
from a feature standpoint. If they are going to continue they should be adding
new features around the ecosystem instead of messing with the core product.
Allow scheduling of tweets, build out services for companies using twitter as
customer support, etc. Then charge for the features that enhance how you use
twitter.

------
randycupertino
Why don't they just make it optional? Also, why do they refuse to give users
the one thing they want, an edit button? Seems so simple to me. What am I
missing?

~~~
AznHisoka
because then someone could tweet 'I think racism is bad', 100 people would
reply 'I agree' and then they could change it to 'I am pro-nazi'

~~~
minimaxir
Facebook has an edit history for statuses for exactly that reason.

~~~
smt88
I'm a web developer. I've integrated Facebook into a bunch of apps in non-
trivial ways. I would describe myself as a power user Facebook.com and the
app.

I had no idea you could see the history of statuses. I'd imagine it's not
widely known. I've actually seen people use this exact scenario for trolling
(going onto a politician's page, saying something the followers agree with,
and then editing it to something awful).

------
minimaxir
That just means it'll happen two weeks from now. :P

~~~
randycupertino
Heh- just like Marissa Mayer's Yahoo layoff "joke" when she said there would
be no layoffs that week.

[http://nypost.com/2016/01/18/marissa-mayers-job-safety-
joke-...](http://nypost.com/2016/01/18/marissa-mayers-job-safety-joke-doesnt-
sit-well-with-workers/)

They had massive lay offs the following week.
[http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/02/technology/yahoo-earnings-
la...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/02/technology/yahoo-earnings-layoffs/)

~~~
minimaxir
True fact: I get all my comedic material from Hacker News comments.

~~~
j_s
[https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says)

~~~
mchahn
Funny stuff. I LOL'd (for real) when I read "Why don't they just host GitHub
wherever the status site is hosted?"

------
Karunamon
Possibly another reason to call shenanigans:

Recently, Twitter has been caught removing hashtags from auto-complete.
They've done this in the past with some more controversial topics I'm not
going to bring up here, but today, they did it with the #RIPTwitter hashtag
that made it to #1 trending.

There is a chance this is a technical problem (the way Twitter works, it's
really _really_ hard to tell if something is intended censorship or platform
breakage), but given how it's happened in the past...

------
tamana
Is that tweet a timeline joke?

------
EvanPlaice
Obligatory #RIPTwitter

------
ZanyProgrammer
I think it'd have made more sense to very gradually increase the 140 char
limit over time, rather than jump straight to 10K-it seems like a ridiculous
jump made out of desperation.

~~~
Pxtl
As I understand it, the 10k isn't that your tweets are 10k, it's that you can
attach a 10k text-document to a tweet, just like you can attach a picture or a
link to a tweet. With that in mind it makes perfect sense since people were
already doing that with pictures-of-text.

------
rednerrus
It seems especially fishy to me that Twitter wants to change this algorithm in
an election year that a strong populist candidate is surging, especially on
Twitter.

~~~
exw
Seriously? Given the many challenges that Twitter deals with right now, you
think they are doing this because of an election year? Pls take your
conspiracy theories to reddit, they don't belong on HN....

------
perseusprime11
Dear Google or Facebook,

Please buy Twitter and improve their product. Both these companies know how to
create a product that delight users at the end of the day.

~~~
AznHisoka
No way should people hope for Facebook having complete control over arguably
the 3 most popular social networks: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

~~~
sp332
And WhatsApp!

