Comment by benten10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benten10 | Hacker News Reader

As the resident Twitter fanboy, I'd like to point out something most people here (and elsewhere) who support the change seem to be missing out.

We (Twitter users) are not as much worried about our stream being polluted, as much as OUR tweets not being seen. Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it. You don't need to reach out for popularity, because they'll see it anyway. Once it becomes an algorithmically-defined popularity contest, it gets very similar to Facebook, something that most of die-hard twitter fans don't want this to be.

Yes, we think the 'algorithmic' feed is going to suck in terms of our streams, but also that our tweets will get lost in all the celebrity noise. Twitter reallllyyy doesn't seem to get that aspect of the complaints. This is more of a celeb-pandering move than to improve user experience.

So by giving my followers the option only see popularly selected tweets, you're already shutting them off me. Yeah, they may not always like my tweets, but they would like to see them once in a while (as I will want them to).

To summarize: We (existing twitter users) had a contract, an expectation-- that our timelines were going to be chronological, and we would see everything. Twitter is trying to change that, and changing our expectations WHILE we are using it. My guess is, it thinks the 'network effect' makes it too big to fail, and doing this will bring in more of the fb-crowd. By doing this, it is alienating us those who were here for precisely 'not-like-fb' features.

I am mad. Very mad. If this is made the default, this is going to be another 'google-killed-reader' rage.

You're assuming that all twitter users are constantly online, and constantly checking tweets. I check twitter once or twice a day. I don't care about their algo, I treat twitter like a mailing list (follow few people, read all their tweets).

<<Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it.>>

I understand your concern, but this seems to contradict reality... According to this article, only a small percentage of your followers actually see your Tweets: http://marketingland.com/facebook-twitter-impressions-90878

I think there are 2 types of twitter users. The first type follows many accounts and skim through the tweets with no effort to go through all of them. This feature is a Godsend for them.

The second type of twitter users, like myself, follow a short list of people, and we actively curate this list so that we can read all the tweets in our timeline. I have just realized that it is in Twitter's best interest if everyone was in the first group - which is likely the majority of users.

Back in 2009 the developer of Tweetie got so frustrated with the second group he made this site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090218122324/http://twitterisn...

It's preposterous for him to prescribe how others should use twitter. Besides, I don't read each and every email I get either.

The thing is I do not trust an algorithm (or popularity) to accurately tag what an "important" tweet is to me. So I tend to follow single-purpose accounts with high signal to noise ratio - if I follow you for your insights in algorithms; serial-tweeting your cat pics will get lead me to unfollow you. I know I miss out on a lot of C.Sci wisdom from people who tweet prodigiously, which is a shame

I wish twitter had user-defined 'channels' like @user/cuda and @user/cats so I can selectively follow a specific channel that interests me...

You're not a profitable demographic for them. The demographic they want is those who use social media primarily to talk to friends. That demo doesn't have dual monitors running all day with twitter in one window. They want the demo that will click on their ads, you probably ignore them.

Fair enough, but I'd argue that if Twitter ever wants to become profitable (and sustainable) it needs to start attracting more casual users. And those casual users don't want to scroll through pages of irrelevant tweets just to find the one or two interesting ones that might be hidden in there.

And to be honest, the kind of user you describe in your post sounds like someone I wouldn't want to follow in the first place. The signal to noise ratio would just be too low. At least with this new algorithm I might follow them and catch the occasional popular tweet from them.

On the other hand, I'm a casual user and nothing you've said matters to me. I think they're making (the reasonable) bet that there are more people like me than there are like you.

> Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it. You don't need to reach out for popularity, because they'll see it anyway.

In my experience, as someone who follows a bunch of people but rarely tweets, this is wrong--at least for me.

When I'm online I usually scroll past a bunch of tweets without reading. There are certain accounts I know are noisy, and I just scan the engagement numbers to see which tweets are worth looking at.

Why do I do this? Because Twitter puts all the tweets in my feed. So to find the good stuff, I have to filter at high speed.

Often what I end up valuing, I find after the fact. It works like this--someone posts a great tweet. Over the next x hours, a bunch of other people reply, RT, MT, or quote tweet it. The original poster retweets some of those. I see that retweet. Now, to get the context, I need to do a bit of hunting to find the original tweet. My feeling is, well, maybe software could do that hunting for me.

> If this is made the default

It will be — the announcement says so. “Then we'll be turning on the feature for you in coming weeks — look out for a notification in your timeline.” (Emphasis mine. Delightful euphemism.)

Yikes, totally missed that bombshell underneath the helpful-vibe phrasing :(

No mention if this applies to lists.

It sounds to me like they are turning it on for everyone but still leaving the option in, so more people can try out the feature.

Right after that they said "If you don't, send your thoughts our way, and you can easily turn it off in settings."

"Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it."

Currently, if your followers scroll through all their tweets, they are guaranteed to see everything you post. The same is true with the new system, as it's described in the blog post, although they might see some other tweets before yours, if the algorithm decides to prioritise them. Perhaps Twitter will later introduce a more Facebook-like system where users have "the option to only see popularly selected tweets", but that's not what they're currently proposing.

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