Jack Dorsey: “We never planned to reorder timelines next week.” | Hacker News Reader

Jack Dorsey: “We never planned to reorder timelines next week.”

twitter.com

49 pointsminimaxir44 comments

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...

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.

Anyone who cares what their friends and other people they've chosen to follow have to say over random strangers would want to use their timeline for that.

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.

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.

What?!? I'm perfectly capable of deciding which way I want to view my timeline.

Also, tweets from a dev and former PM this evening both demonstrate an unforgiveable level of dismissive arrogance toward user feedback. Twitter is clueless when it comes to UX.

Link?

https://twitter.com/bhcarpenter/status/695811814244773892

https://twitter.com/ptr/status/696025411898085376

read the timelines ... very interesting.

the first is from a Twitter iOS dev, the second a former TL PM.

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.

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?

I was a holdout on editing because I thought there was an integrity importance. But I've totally come around. Twitter needs to do this immediately.

Honestly, I don't think an edit option would be a great idea. I'd recommend you to read this article[1], it's food for thought about the topic.

1: https://css-tricks.com/features-complicated/

That's crazy over-complicating something that Facebook & Slack had no trouble figuring out.

Because control of priority in the feed is key to making brands pay to reach followers that they normally could reach for free, after investing in building the audience on Twitter's platform. Case in point, FB.

Where does it say it's not optional?

I've never needed to edit a tweet. It's supposed to be a "now" service, is it really now if you can go back and change everything you've written?

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'

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

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).

So how have comment systems with edit functionality survived since the advent of the internet? This is a non-issue. It's an interesting prank, but that's about it.

Retweeting makes this a huge problem. The way the edit button could work, however, is to remove all RTs and favs and create a new tweet. This isn't what people who complain the most about the lack of an edit button (celebrities) actually want though, so it remains as it is.

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

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-...

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

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

https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says

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

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...

Is that tweet a timeline joke?

Obligatory #RIPTwitter

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.

Are they going to 10k sized tweets, or some sort of notes facility? It seems like the main use case crying out is people attaching massive blocks of texts as images.

What do you think is going to happen, people are going to start typing thousands of words? No, people will type a little more than they do now because that's how people communicate.

181 characters -

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.

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.

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....

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.

What's stopping you from posting 140 character quips on Facebook or G+?

Not sure if your argument is in favor of killing Twitter or improving the Twitter as product.

I'm just asking what one of these companies would get out of buying Twitter?

The problem is, think about how badly the userbase is reacting to this essentially-minor change. If they wake up one morning and Twitter says "redirecting you to Facebook!" they're going to be outraged. So you wouldn't be buying the users, you'd be buying a shitstorm.

I did not mean to say Facebook or Google replace Twitter with these platforms. If you look at Instagram and WhatsApp, Facebook only made these products better, gave them more independence, did not force them into Facebook ecosystem. Facebook has become really great at execution and building great products. Twitter would get the same independence from Facebook but they will learn a thing or two about execution. Similarly, Google has a different value prop. They can bring machine learning to Twitter and make Twitter really useful.

I'm just asking what one of these companies would get out of buying Twitter?

Having one fewer competitor. Not sure what users would get out of it, though.

Hey hey good joke! If every web service was as bad as g or fb we could all enjoy a internet that acts more like cable television...

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

And WhatsApp!

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