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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

The best part about Twitter is the simple timeline. Twitter doesn’t care about what the account represents, so all accounts have the same priority.

Yes, Twitter has started to mess with its timeline, but that’s besides the point.

Facebook’s noise problem is one that they themselves created. Countless of times I found myself subscribed to some page only because I liked one of their posts. Which is bullshit, because in my vocabulary Follow != Like.

Then they tried fixing this by prioritizing posts based on a bullshit ranking system only they understand. That didn’t work either.

Oh well, maybe we’ll go back full circle after all.

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While I still vastly prefer Twitter over Facebook, I have to disagree with you; I think Twitter is beginning to go down the same road that Facebook did a few years ago.

Twitter (like Facebook) was set up with a core set of rules for the user to follow. You have 140 characters, your feed is a chronological list of the tweets of those you follow, likes are support for a tweet, but non-visible to your followers, while retweets are visible to your followers. There may be others, but to me these are the 'core' of the user experience.

At this point, Twitter has removed the functionality of almost all of these points. They're experimenting with longer tweets, the timeline is no longer chronological, and (in my opinion the worst change) they've changed the behavior of the like function. It no longer simply notifies the original user, but now has some random chance of also appearing in other timelines. They've muddled their basic system for reasons I can't quite understand. If anything, I'm choosing to like things less. In the past, I would've retweeted one tweet, but liked several similar posts to avoid oversaturation in my timeline. Now, I feel that I must use likes in the same way as retweets.

Also, why is the second item in my newsfeed always a "Sponsored Link"

I'm not using facebook (not since they had this anti-adblock stuff), but if it is always the second item for everyone, it should be quite easy to hide with a small greasemonkey script (that you don't even have to code yourself, someone probably already did).

If you're looking for a Facebook customization extension, check out http://www.fbpurity.com/

Here's a chrome extension that works for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts-bl...

A chrome extension that uploads all my FB data to its servers? Neat!

That extension contains no code for uploading to any server and has no host permissions in its manifest to do so, its a cosmetic filter.

Because of ad money to pay for the service?

Another fun "like" side effect is when Facebook rebroadcasts likes. This can be kinda funny / morbid when someone who has passed away (but has not had their Facebook profile memorialized) "likes" some random brand...

Twitter is all about pushing "top tweets" these days.

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