
Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem - aelaguiz
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/05/sorry-my-feed-is-full/
======
ProblemFactory
Automated filtering approaches like Facebook's edgerank are a band-aid fix for
fundamentally wrong user interface. For me, there is no content on the
internet that is time-critical and _has_ to be consumed in the order it was
posted, or as soon as it was posted.

The great thing about the Google Reader interface was that you can sign up to
300 blogs, and see which ones have new posts in the left hand column. You read
the interesting ones every few days, and perhaps scroll through the headlines
of the boring ones once per month.

This way no post goes missing because it is too old, a frequent poster doesn't
take priority over an infrequent but more interesting one, and the user
decides how to "filter" content based on every visit.

~~~
mmahemoff
With respect, Google Reader was used by a tiny fraction of the internet
population, despite being operated by the biggest online brand for 8 years.
The majority of people opted to get their news from sites and services which
used some combination of human and computer powered filtering.

I agree the Google Reader model is fantastic for information junkies (in a
good way :) with relatively advanced technical skills; but empirically, it
didn't work for the mass market Twitter is going after.

So I don't see Edgerank as a band-aid fix, but a fundamental requirement for a
large-scale system like this. Because (a) on the demand side, recommendations
are what people actually want - let computers do what they're good at and
reduce the human tedium of sifting through inane FourSquare checkins etc; (b)
on the supply side, _relevant_ native ads inside a recommendations stream are
the business model.

For these reasons, I disagree with OP when he says "Twitter should not abandon
its unfiltered feed". I know it will cause shock, shock, when they do it, but
they _will_ do it because it's so fundamental to their objectives as a
mainstream consumer service.

~~~
manicbovine
I agree with you, but I think there is at least three related usability issues
that made Google Reader less attractive to users. Namely, Google Reader
required multiple tools to use efficiently. It also required users to have a
basic understanding of RSS feeds. Finally, users had to cope with multiple
information formats -- possibly hundreds.

Here's just one example. Recently, a popular web comic changed its feed to
contain thumbnails, links and ads -- requiring the user to click through in
order to see the comic. Previously it just syndicated large, readable versions
of the comic.

That makes a lot of sense to me, but I have to wonder if a less experienced
user might feel that something broke. This leads me to consider how it must
feel for a "regular user" might feel or react while browsing between feeds and
coping with information provided in so many different formats. Some feeds have
pictures, some don't, some have complete articles, others just send out links
and ads. Maybe I'm giving myself a false memory, but I can remember a feeling
of cognitive friction while switching between feeds. I'm an information junkie
and I'm technologically literate, so I dealt with it.

I'm saying RSS would possibly fair better if the presentation format were
standardized across sites. Maybe a simple style manual would unite enough
content providers around a single format?

The problem is actually worse with the popular content providers. They each
seem to redefine the layout of an RSS feed, whereas the long tail of bloggers
seem to coalesce around a very basic format.

~~~
mmahemoff
Yes, you have a good point about consistency. That's one of several reasons
the siloed equivalents of RSS (Twitter, Facebook, etc) "won". There's a
consistent appearance, consistent metadata, and consistent interactions when
it comes to liking and commenting; that kind of interaction was never
standardised with RSS, despite some basic attempts. The best you could do was
"star it on Google Reader" as a de facto standard.

This is really orthogonal to the question of stream filtering, I maintain
that's still an issue for RSS aggregators even though as you point out, there
are other usability concerns too.

------
protomyth
I do wonder, if Twitter hadn't gone psycho on the twitter clients, if this
problem would have been solved. Twitter stopped most development on this issue
for anyone outside Twitter.

~~~
teaneedz
The spproach may still work. Apple's walled garden has contributed to what
many consider a good UE.

Having control of the UE is important.

However, I believe that Twitter could have managed the developer angst better.
There was warning though.

~~~
protomyth
I can still write innovative apps for Apple's various OSes, but I cannot write
an innovative Twitter client. They closed that door.

I think Twitter would have been better off just telling all the client writers
that it was a requirement to show the "ad tweets" in the stream and call it a
day. They are not Apple .

------
TillE
This is a huge problem, IMO. It only takes one or two noisy accounts to flood
your feed on a regular basis. There are a handful of people I really don't
want to unfollow, but they tend to dominate my feed even when they're not
completely overwhelming it.

All I really want is the ability to designate certain follows as "important",
which would give me their tweets in something like the format of an RSS reader
at the top of the page. Then dump the rest into the current "river of news"
style which I can wade through, or not.

~~~
jusben1369
It's always confused me to that I can't prioritize tweeters into 1, 2 and 3.
Open up twitter after 8 hours and the tweets are sorted in priority.

~~~
fudged71
Because this feature would be abused by everyone who thinks too highly of
their own posts.

~~~
jusben1369
How would that work? I mean I would follow a new person and categorize them
into 1, 2 or 3 preference.

------
ilamont
I've always wondered how people who follow thousands of people are able to get
much value from their timelines. I've concluded that they don't, or they are
using lists or other tools to manage their Twitter experience.

Speaking of lists, I disagree with the author's claim that they are hard to
set up. Twitter (and many Twitter apps) have made a list quite easy to set up,
and monitor. Doing this is one way to handle the unfiltered feed problem.

He brings up an interesting point, though, regarding negative behaviors such
as being less likely to follow new people. I agree that this can happen, but
the flip side is people may be far more selective about who they follow as
time goes on. Assuming that such users are regularly unfollowing bad or spammy
accounts, their Twitter experience should improve over time.

~~~
mmahemoff
"I've always wondered how people who follow thousands of people are able to
get much value from their timelines."

Simple: TweetDeck. I can see it now on my 2nd screen, with 32 columns allowing
me to, yes, effectively follow thousands of accounts and topics using lists
and filters.

Acquiring and growing TweetDeck is really the best thing Twitter's done, from
a purely selfish experience, as it's become a fantastic research/communication
tool.

It's obviously low priority for them, evidenced by shutting down the mobile
clients, but it seems they are smart enough to keep it running to keep a
percentage of power users active in the network.

------
pastProlog
One phenomenon which Facebook takes into account which Twitter does not is
that of the loquacious acquaintance, possibly someone with a business
constantly hyping things, possibly someone who just likes to hear themselves
speak more often than I do. They apply slight pressure to me to follow them on
Twitter or friend them on Facebook so I do so.

On Facebook I can easily set people to three settings which are private to me
- read everything they write, read only significant things they write (things
which get more than ordinary likes/replies, or whatever), or ignore them. This
is great for me, otherwise my entire Facebook feed would be filled with my 4-5
chattiest friends or current/former coworkers, I'd have to scroll through
their collective 10-12 posts a day to see anyone elses, etc.

Twitter does not have this option where I publicly follow someone, due to them
pressuring me to follow them on Twitter, but where I can actually privately
ignore them. Which just tends to mean I use Twitter less. Maybe there is an
option buried somewhere where I can do this, but it's definitely not obvious
like on Facebook. Which just means I use Twitter a lot less. Because all it is
for me is a constant stream of 4-5 chatty acquaintances with the dozens of
others I follow popping in once in a while.

There are ways to deal with this on Twitter, but none of them are that good. I
can create another account, but then there are problems from that - accounts
with private tweets I no longer have access to or have to ask for two adds
from everyone etc. I can create a private list without these people on it, but
then I have to go to the trouble of maintaining two lists - the main list and
the private list. Facebook just makes this a lot easier.

~~~
lancewiggs
I have one list (top 80 or so) and the firehose (thousands). The list is for
the people who I don't really want to miss, and the firehose is for dipping
into now and then. Excessive verbosity belongs in the firehose.

I occasionally promote and demote, and as a private list nobody is the wiser.
I assume others do this too.

------
Terretta
If you like this article's ideas, are fascinated by social graphs and
smoothing communication among nodes, enjoy functional programming (functional
Scala, Clojure, etc), and are interested in a new job, drop me an email.

~~~
sebkomianos
Have you posted on the "Who's hiring"
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475879))
thread?

~~~
Terretta
Haven't, but will, thanks. This was extremely topical, so thought I'd mention
here where there were likely to be interested people.

------
teaneedz
The OP is trying to solve a problem with a FB mentality. Twitter is a
different animal. Lists solve many problems. Twitter could do a better job
surfacing lists and making them easier to implement and return to, but we the
users have a responsibility too I believe. We often complain about spammy
accounts or unmanageable TLs when _we_ control the Follow button.

------
lucb1e
There should be a distinction between friends and followers. I'd friend many
more people, but I don't give a shit about most friend's tweets. (Most of them
are about their current dinner, or something equally unimportant.) I think I
currently follow around 15 people, and that's exactly right for how often I
check my feed and how much time I want to spend on twitter.

So for me this works is fine, but I know many others that follow for social
reasons, not because the person they start following is interesting. And if
you do that, yes indeed your timeline will be overflowing all the time.

I've never not followed anyone for having too many tweets in my timeline
already. And if someone starts spamming shit I don't care about (accounts with
lots of followers sometimes abuse it for political or other things), I
unfollow them without second thought. And I let them know why I unfollowed
(like with downvotes here and on stackoverflow, I always try to comment if I
do negative actions).

------
utnick
I've wanted a twitter client similar to the old aim clients with respect to
away messages.

Just a list of people I follow and their most recent tweet. Either ordered
alphabetically or ordered by date last tweeted. If I hover over one of the
people , then I can look at their past X tweets.

------
mikegioia
The author's suggestion here to fix this problem is to have twitter offer feed
cleaning tools and un-follow recommendations. Not only will this never happen,
but it could create far too many false positives to even be a good thing.

I think the only way out of this is for twitter to put out 1 or a series of
lenses with which to view your feed. People still want to follow all of their
friends as well as celebrities, athletes, bands, news aggregators, etc;
however, they don't need to see all of that crap in one feed. I think it'll be
the redditization of twitter that solves this problem.

------
b123400
Personally I don't think Twitter cares much about the quality of users'
timeline.

Twitter doesn't provide any easy way to manage followings while keep
suggesting people to follow, because promoted accounts will be unfollowed
easily.

I am one of the user in the official popular users list in China region, but
most of my tweets are Japanese. This kind of careless mistake should not
happen if they had do a simple review before selecting me. I've ask them to
remove me from the list, but they never reply.

They seems to encourage users to keep following, increase the quantity not
quality.

------
joe_the_user
I am a pretty heavy Facebook user and can't see the slightest use in Twitter.
Or rather, it seems like an actively awful thing.

Facebook already _allows_ and even encourages short posts. Forcing them seems
like recipe to produce horrid dreck and that does seem just like what Twitter
does.

------
amrnt
I write an article before about this issue that we have with most of the
social networks: [https://medium.com/editors-
picks/b5eaaa3ff7c3](https://medium.com/editors-picks/b5eaaa3ff7c3)

------
whyleyc
This problem is addressed by tools like
[http://www.qureet.com/](http://www.qureet.com/)

Disclaimer: I've met the guy who runs this, but haven't yet got round to
trying it out.

------
Zakuzaa
Is there potential for a third party app doing it (the fixes mentioned in the
article) instead?

------
BurritoAlPastor
The second sentence of this article is false. When the lede contains blatant
errors, that's your signal, as a reader, to stop reading.

~~~
jusben1369
Because I had to go back: "Everything you tweet shows up to every one of your
followers"

------
untilHellbanned
everything goes through FB goggles with this author

