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Comment by jakelarkin | Hacker News Reader

"But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging."

right, they only added photos, video, FB style profile pages, link shortening, location metadata, algorithmic timeline, moments, messaging, and extensively developed mobile apps but otherwise yes exactly the same as when they were an 140 char SMS broadcast service.

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I knew this was going to be challenged, and you're not wrong. But Twitter still feels closest to the original incarnation of 'here be a (roughly) reverse-chronological list of text-message length posts'. They had the timeline, the "friend feed" first, and most enhancements affected only the payload of their messages. Moments was a big innovation, and it's presented as a separate offering on their website.

Whereas Facebook's primary function went from a carefully-curated yearbook-style personal and interest page to an... algorithmic timeline of friend's status updates and tumble-blog reposts.

Snapchat went from an app that sends disappearing photos to a general-purpose multimedia messaging app that happens to still put a timer on photos.

Instagram went from a photo and selfie-sharing app to a general-purpose social network with an algorithmic timeline, sponsored posts, and private messaging.

Why are we putting a premium on 'retaining it's original features' ?

This looks like a logical fallacy.

Because a lot of radical changeovers in other services are not user needs driven and look more like bait and switch.

> (roughly) reverse-chronological list of text-message length posts'.

Twitter went algorithmic timeline not too long ago, sadly.

Fortunately, it can still be turned off - but is on by default.

You can turn it off??? This is the best news I've heard in ages.

FWIW, as far as I know it hasn't infected 3rd party clients, or at least Tweetbot is still unaffected.

Of course, you can.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/164083#settings

> it can still be turned off

Where? I unchecked every setting that I found, but I still get that "While you were away" and "#something is currently trending" bullshit.

Here is how you do it.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/164083#settings

You can't get rid of the dumb "while you were away" thing, but you can block it. With ublock origin, add this to your "My Filters" settings:

  twitter.com##has-recap

Twitter switching away from a chronological see-everything timeline was a massive departure from its original idea, on the same scale as many of your other examples. To me that was a core feature and not having it just makes Twitter much less interesting to open.

A lot of that is different from the original, but IMHO not against the "concept of microblogging".

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