Twitter's rumored algorithmic timeline switch

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2016/02/06/twitters-algorithmic-timeline-switch-is-all-your-own-fault/#44f9e43831b6

by judgementday • 10 years ago

56 40 10 years ago

forbes.com

frik3• 10 years ago

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_account2• 10 years ago

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

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.

frik3• 10 years ago

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.

obsurveyor• 10 years ago

I've always used sk=lf to get chronological Facebook. I wonder what the difference is, if any because I'm trying h_chr and it seems to be the same order.

My issue with it has been even though it's chronological, it doesn't actually show you all the posts from all your friends. It still does it's own crappy algorithmic filter(I think it's based on interaction) and I miss stuff from people I want to hear from all the time. I only have about 60 friends and no one is relatively chatty so there's no reason why I should miss anything.

icelancer• 10 years ago

sk=h_chr forces the Newsfeed to display in chronological order

I use this bookmark too, but no, it doesn't. Posts are still "bumped" with comments and things are filtered. Can't stand it...

argonaut2• 10 years ago

Yup. Mark Zuckerberg is really glad he killed Facebook. http://www.google.com/finance?q=fb

There's a good reason they listen to the data and not to the user complaints of a vocal minority.

frik3• 10 years ago

Let's talk about FB (the social network asset) in two years. Zuck won't bother and just retire early in his life, like Bill.

fluxic• 10 years ago

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.

DyslexicAtheist2• 10 years ago

had the same problem with forbes when I used adblock plus. switched to uBlock and it works (which also seems to be less of a resource hog). ... forbes is shit though and IMO submissions should really be blacklisted from HN

r721• 10 years ago

Archive.is helped: http://archive.is/Gx23X

I wonder whether this is potentially dangerous for them to do.

CharlesW• 10 years ago

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...)

th0br0• 10 years ago

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

https://valve.github.io/fingerprintjs2/

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

DyslexicAtheist2• 10 years ago

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.

eecks• 10 years ago

I don't understand moving from Facebook to Twitter (or vice versa) - they're completely different use cases.

argonaut2• 10 years ago

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

Macha• 10 years ago

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.

walterbell• 10 years ago

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.

rrggrr• 10 years ago

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.

grandalf• 10 years ago

Without an algorithmic feed, the utility of twitter maxes out once you start following more than about 200 people.

The point of the algorithm is to show the user the content he/she wanted to see in the first place but might not have had the patience to scroll for, or might have gotten fed up reading lower quality content and closed the app before reading.

An algorithmic feed will also help a lot with spam detection/prevention.

gherkin0• 10 years ago

I would rather make the call myself about what I want to see delegate to some twitter algorithm. And yes, I'm going to sometimes miss tweets I'd otherwise be interested in; it's no big loss. What I want to see is what's happening now.

pjc503• 10 years ago

Twitter's journalistic and celebrity users are its ONLY value

Not quite - certainly all value is user created, but saying that only certain users are valuable is just as bad. There are whole subgenres of people that don't fit those two categories like "weird twitter", activists, indie game devs, and novelty/parody accounts.

How do you monetise Tahrir Square? Should you?

sphericalgames• 10 years ago

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.

pjc503• 10 years ago

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".

untog• 10 years ago

How do you figure that Twitter is a Wikipedia? It is very far from being a vetted, verified source of information. People say whatever they want on there.

A non-linear timeline makes sense to me, as long as the linear one is also left as an option.

nip• 10 years ago

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-...

pjc503• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

LinkPlug• 10 years ago

#RIPTwitter > https://twitter.com/hashtag/RIPTwitter

gdulli• 10 years ago

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.

facepalm• 10 years ago

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

LukeB_UK• 10 years ago

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

Twirrim• 10 years ago

emphasis on next week? What about the week after? Next month?

soohyung• 10 years ago

Apparently it's only a rumor and nothing more. https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968

tshtf• 10 years ago

We never planned to reorder timelines next week.

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

yolesaber• 10 years ago

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.

Futurebot• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

brianchu• 10 years ago

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.

Twitter's rumored algorithmic timeline switch

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