The Feed Is Dying
nymag.com
nymag.com
the "while you were gone" cannot be though.
I don't know this firsthand because it doesn't seem to have been enabled on my account.
A few months ago the "gone" time got reduced to just a few hours which was a little annoying but survivable. I don't really want to go 100% algorithmic though. If I just wanted to see the popular stuff I'd follow buzzfeed or something.
It's not like I see any more ads this way, so I don't get the point. I do get a lot of stuff that isn't ads but which I didn't subscribe to and don't care about, and it's infuriating. Twitter clearly doesn't want users like me who follow only enough stuff they can actually read. Probably someone's bonus is linked to the average number of accounts followed. It's enough to make me seriously consider not bothering with Twitter any more. I wonder what that would do to their bonus? Facebook already used the same method to successfully drive down my usage of it (and therefore my viewing of ads) by at least an order of magnitude.
For example, imagine a quick-switcher that flips the feed from algorithmic to time based with a single tap. That's a powerful feature and adapts twitter to different use-cases fast.
I think the key here is to give users options instead of trying to shepard them into a particular direction, especially with their bipolar userbase (e.g. people use Twitter for various, seemingly disjoint use cases)
Live data is their product, but they bury it with stupid business decisions; utterly baffling. They tout MAUs during their conference calls (which they always miss), but that has nothing to do with their product. Their product has some of the top content providers, providing unique content in real time. Facebook can't say that, no other platform sans Snapchat can say that. Facebook has figured this out and that's why they are rolling out offerings like Paper. Twitter doesn't get it.
I mean...the old Discover tab was fantastic and if they filtered that with their new algos, then I think people would love the result! Instead we get a static list of top news (Moments) that you can find on Yahoo's homepage.
Right, but hasn't Paper been a gigantic flop?
I'm not saying Twitter should be worth more than Facebook, only that their core component is undervalued, but Twitter seems keen on killing it because they are trying to focus on meaningless stats like MAUs, which have only a small importance to do with what their model should be.
If Twitter were under someone who saw it as an information company instead of a social media platform, imo, it would be a steal of a company at the current market price...unfortunately Jack and his team are incompetent.
But that doesn't really have much to do with what I'm saying, Facebook has figured out that original content is important (something it now lacks; if you don't include Instagram), that doesn't mean they've found the solution. Twitter doesn't seem to know that is important, but they already have somewhat of a solution.
Wall Street, Jack and their like promise things like "connect with friends" but it's really "look at content that makes us money". The worst part? We helped them do it to ourselves.
It's time to think differently about infrastructure software, including social media sites. We can do better, and we can do it in a way that makes all our lives richer, not just the founders and investors.
Seems really strange that when they get to their main product, they forget about all that.
Sadly I seem to have missed the golden years of Twitter.
Feed is now dominated by adverts, endlessly shared click-bait, repeat content (especially if conspiratorial/shocking/fake - a variation on click bait), and the "you interact with this person sometimes, here's everything they ever do". And begging me to follow Zuckerberg. Compared to a couple of years ago it seems boring and shallow.
FB is particularly bad, but partly seems my friends are part of the problem (and/or click bait is hugely on the rise; it works). Twitter maybe a bit less so, but this out-of-sequence stuff is terrible. Also miss the early Twitter days when I found interesting randoms to follow from the public firehose, now all celebrity focussed.
You can claim the market will solve this (users will sell their time and speech to a higher bidder, now that Twitter's prices no longer seem competitive), but if people were empowered to have their computers do what they want, it never would have happened in the first place.
Enterprises usually own their servers, so I would grant that caveat, but even that is going away with cloud providers.
Try sending a tweet to a Weibo user and see how that works out.
Usage defines the capability. Just like anything.
In the name of fighting spam, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. have made it a real chore to get messages delivered to their networks. I still haven't figured out how to get messages delivered to AOL.
Of course being user owned, by definition users should be allowed to outsource their email service to large companies, and they do, because it's a lot cheaper that way.
But an email server they own themselves, with their own rules, own display preferences, compatible with billions of other email accounts, is well within their reach. And millions of people do just that.
The distinction is that 99.9% of consumers and an increasing number of organizations don't want to do it in house and would rather let someone else do it.
Again, it's not about capability, it's about what people actually are doing.
You couldn't build your own version of fb that can view posts from your friends.
You can setup your own email service to view emails from your friends who are using @gmail.
That's an important distinction.
Twitter (and other dominant free products like Facebook) will behave the way our overlords want them to behave. Consumers have surrendered the free market. Capitalism is only played behind the scenes.
It can absolutely work. The product is not free. The product is our attention and internet services (Twitter/Google/Facebook) are competing for that limited supply of attention in order to sell it on to their advertising customers. We won't give our attention to them for free though, so they have to buy it by providing a service we want. If they don't provide an attractive enough service, we turn around and sell our attention to someone else. That's how this market works.
Perhaps the problem arises when the product is not only free but also a virtual monopoly. Changing the TV channel is easy. Changing to a Twitter alternative is not. As consumers, we get to choose between an 80% Twitter or no Twitter at all.
The promise is that algorithmic TL will show you the best organic tweets, and relevant ads. In practice, the ads are trash and the organic tweets are just as bad as usual, but in the wrong order.
1: Diapers, cars. I don't have kids, and while I've been looking at cars, I sure as hell won't buy a new one.
We could call it a "blog", and the people who curate the feeds could be called "bloggers".
A feed is a feed. It doesn't matter how it's created. There is utility to the chronological feed as there is the the algorithmic.
Curation has been happening for a very long time. The problem is that it's not enough even to curate.
For those who experience the problem, the issue really is that they have so much information of potential relevance but still can't read more than one feed item at a time (unless it's just pictures)
http://000fff.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png
This wont be solved by it being curated because that introduces another problem which is whether you trust the curation.
Not sure it can ever be solved. But the feed isn't dying. It's fundamental.
True, I guess, but what if my feed is already curated, by me. Facebook, for instance is annoying to use, because it can't seem to remember that I just want everything, in chronological order. I don't have a ton a people on Facebook, nor do I care to, but I do want to see everything these people post. It won't amount to more than 30 minutes of content a week anyway.
If you had to enable "curated feed", would you turn it on? For most people, even those who have a large number friends or follow a ton of people/companies, I suspect the answer would be no.
Sometimes the people I follow append the images, but most of the time Twitter attaches the images to individual tweets or RTs. It's possible to disable most of the images on my phone (via the Twitter app settings), but on the Web the images cannot be stopped. Even if autoplay videos are disabled, the preview image will still show up.
It's irritating and lowers the value of the feed I have created on Twitter. Most of the time I just want to read opinions or retweets of the people I follow without an image or logo getting in my way.
p.s. sorry for my english.
I believe Twitter and Instagram are doing this because the chronological feeds don't work well for a large portion of their users. You do wonder why they don't disable it for their most active users. (why try to reorder something if the user sees it all anyway?)
We provide both chronological, ranked and personalized feeds over at getstream.io
Demand for personalized feeds is definitely picking up rapidly, also among smaller apps.
I'm thinking of curation based on a personal relationship instead of an algorithm. You would indicate that you're interested in machine learning, libertarian politics and cooking (or whatever), and people would check hn, new york times, etc and compile lists of those items. I know it's not the same thing as this post, but it's a problem and I'm wondering if anyone else feels it strongly enough to pay for a solution.
I personally have unsubscribed as I favor RSS feeds, but I recommend them highly for people looking for someone else to weed through the crap for you. He does a great job.
I don't think he's begun charging yet. I wouldn't pay. I suspect he could get a decent niche to pay though.
My social medium of choice is, despite my many and loud gripes about it, Google+. It's not even nearly awesome (none of the major options are), but, for a while at least, it offered two compelling features.
The first is Notifications. Action on your own posts, posts with which you've interacted, and (selected) people mentioning you, will show up in your Notifications list (which ought be a stream in its own right). This is, if you think about it, one of the highest possible signifiers of relevance: something you've already indicated an interest in in which others are interacting, often directly with you.
The other was Search. After a couple of years, even the vast wasteland of G+ had accumulated a catalog of interesting posts, and via Search those could be found. Search was always a bastard child, and it's considerably worse now than it had been for a long time, but given a keyword signifier, it would, sometimes, return relevant content.
I actually wrote a really embarassing mash note to G+ management -- Vic and the project's then product manager -- highlighting this.
The response of Google was, of course, to kill both features, or attempt to do so valiently.
The problem with the algorithm is that at best it can guess or assume intent. But it never fucking bothers to ask you directly, or to allow you to indicate your preferences.
I've likened this to a good salesperson. These exist, and I've on occasion, despite my anti-commercial tendencies, encountered and appreciated them. The good one will size you up as you enter a store, compose a good idea of what you're looking for, consider elements (say size or measurements for clothing), and match these with stock. Then they'll ask you what you're looking for. They'll return with a selection of items and, often, a few others. They'll read your responses, even subtle, on what's been offered and take a "no" as a "no".
That is the one feature that is missing from virtually all current electronic information interfaces. I wanted, an hour or so back, to tell Amazon to show me only books published matching a subject from 1990-1999. Actually, filtering by cover colour would also have been useful. No can do.
For media streams, the thing I most want to do is filter crap. Again, G+ offers no such capabilities. There are websites I never want to see (say, WSJ at HN), topics or people I don't care to hear about, etc. The best option I've got is to uncircle or block crap, which actually works quite well. But finer controls would be hugely useful.
Twitter's experiment seems to be headed the same way. And it's not going to work.
Because the algorithm is an idiot.
You can extend it to allow multiple topic parents via a tagging system, but this usually seems to complicate things.
facebook has wall -> post -> comments, but could add richer hierarchy above post