Twitter is monkeying with the order of tweets in timelines | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is monkeying with the order of tweets in timelines

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92 pointsqzervaas74 comments

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.

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.

Probably some reason like "they took investments on the premise that they were more than the simple product".

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.

Metrics can be very short-termist though.

My facebook seems to be filled with auto-play videos these days. It's not really about my friends any more.

And why should it be?

Because that, long-term, is the only thing that drives people to Facebook?

"Come join Facebook and get some auto-playing video ads in your face, but no actual content from your friends will be shown!" is not a compelling value proposition for the prospective new user. (Applies to Twitter too.)

It's got great metrics though! So pointy-haired bosses love it.

It's like a restaurant beating and mugging all their customers before allowing them to leave the premises. Average check size goes from $32 to $250 instantly. Awesome metrics! And absolutely no comeuppance could possibly occur.

Yes and no -- if you're bad at A/B testing and analytics, then maybe. However, given that FB is growing to 1.5B people, I'd say that they're doing something right in terms of balancing short-term moves with long-term gains.

Their metrics may not account for knowledge of the 'feature'.

Yes, users will use a positive service more often. But if that service is positve at the expense of hiding things, then some will not be happy.

I think that's what you need to keep in mind. The "some" that are unhappy are such a small fraction of the Facebook/Twitter userbase that it's a clear net win to make these changes. I can guarantee the changes were A/B tested, the metrics gathered, and a decision made. Of course there will be a slice of the userbase who doesn't like the change, but that's obviously already accounted for in their planning and forecasting.

A/B testing has two big and obvious problems. One is that A/B testing can only lead to a local maxima in the best case scenario. The other is that A/B testing, being about statistical hypothesis testing, is prone to interpretation problems, which is why the changes you introduce in the variation have to be small, otherwise you don't know what you're measuring.

In other words, yes it can help you optimize the color or size of a Buy Now button. But it can't help you build a product.

> One is that A/B testing can only lead to a local maxima in the best case scenario.

What you mean is: it can only lead to a local maximum in the worst case scenario. Even blind guesses can occasionally lead to a global maximum, and A/B testing is better than a blind guess.

Again, another insightful and accurate assessment!

Just give us a toggle.

A permanent one, not like FB's deal you have to click each time.

The FB toggle basically does nothing.

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.

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.

Thank you! You're not alone either. I'm pretty sure Twitter is going to discover that their data driven approach is only as good as the data, which based on their most recent product trends, has not been very good. It seems that many companies really struggle with understanding UX.

twitter is marketing to the same group of people that want to vote for Donald Trump.

I think many teams end up chasing the wrong metrics - data driven at the expense of UX. I'm ready to pack up and call it quits on Twitter.

If this is the reason, you were probably better off if you couldn't see the obvious most recent sort.

I don't want to take the time to have to look for a function that should be a default.

The "Most Recent" sort is not at all obvious, at least on my Facebook, and it also quietly turns itself off. It's quite user-hostile.

Twitter is ridiculous in that way. Absolutely ridiculous. I'm constantly baffled just how badly the site is layed out and how they keep making it worse. I still never understand who replied to who, where multi-part tweets start and end, why some text is larger than other, where I have to click to get a perma-link, how those blue lines/separators group tweets and how in the world I enlarge embedded content. When I'm way down a page and click on an image and close it, I'm thrown back to the top of the page.

Apparently, there was a real need to reduce blogging to one-sentence text messages. Alright, they got that market for now. But their interface is straight from hell and they'll pay for that, eventually. You already see people moving away (Instagram, etc). They might be where myspace was before facebook.

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.

> Once I'm done scrolling through the content I'm done. I don't miss things.

Twitter wants you to feel like you are never done and that you are missing things.

That's how I feel twitter operates now though. If you don't keep scrolling until you reached something stale you'll miss something. Start following a handful of power users and you'll start taking twitter breaks like smoke breaks.

Indeed. Once you go past certain amount of followed you end up inventing some rules for new ones. Like not too many tweets per day, especially if there's more RTs than OC.

Twitter is like a garden with weeds. Constant need of pruning. Facebook just hides most that you don't commit to every now and then. Twitter has also a bit too much automation and anonymity. But some of the parody accounts are gems.

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

I am one of them. But keeping your timeline manageable takes trimming (much like RSS). But maybe that is too much work for some people. Facebook (they make a selection) and Snapchat (it disappears) take care of that (but I don't want them to).

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.

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.

I haven't noticed that, but I can certainly see that being annoying. I mostly use Tweetbot on my iPhone, but occasionally log in on my desktop PC which where I see the While You Were Out.

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.

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."

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.

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/

I think the home feed is quite similar to the old discover feed and I have been using it here and there.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

Totally agree. Twitter has the wrong management team in place. However, I discovered Ello and will mske that my new home. It respects users and has the right view of ad-tech. I will misd Twitter though.

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.

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

That Twitter is employing 6,000 people is a mystery to me. That's what we get with that many employees: Instead of becoming as sturdy and reliable as an API and a protocol, there's always several subgroups who aren't submerged by day-to-day work and who end up proposing a disruptive change. After much fighting, one of them wins.

The other way is Snapchat: 1-2 employees, probably lots of profits, period.

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.

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/

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I wrote an opinion on what I think Twitter could become (https://medium.com/@danclay/how-twitter-could-become-the-ube...), 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.

>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?

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.

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.

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.

it would be fine if that feature would default to off

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.

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".

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

And this is how it ends....

Clown town.

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.

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

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