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Comment by enkiv2 | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately, it's a matter of control.

On twitter, you're still stuck in a bubble -- only, one created by ranking based on projected interaction. (Functionally, this means an angry bubble: you see only things Twitter thinks will drag you into a flamewar.)

On the fediverse, you set your own filters and pick your own followers, see things in unadulterated reverse-chronological order, and nobody's pushing promoted posts on you.

(Ultimately, this comes down to having a non-profit-oriented, non-centralized system, favoring multiple independent identities. And, it's a throwback to the pre-eternal-september era of usenet, where you went online to have reasonable discussions and added people who annoyed you to your killfile.)

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Hell, on my instance you can see things in unadulterated CHRONOLOGICAL order. It’s great. Load the site and you get a modest chunk of recent toots from the people you follow, with the oldest at top - usually no more than an hour. Scroll down and you’ll see your friends having conversations, maybe the occasional multi-toot from one friend, all in normal reading order.

It took about a day to get used to and I am now amazed that anyone thinks it should work any other way. Whenever I try to read my Twitter timeline I’m amazed how much mental effort I was continually spending to read backwards conversations.

I get the newest at the top and have to scroll down to see what I've missed. A client that acts like my Twitter clients do and saves my place, allowing me to scroll up from there to see everything I've missed, would be excellent. Can't seem to find one, though.

Mastalab (Android) will do this. Twidere will, too, but its Mastodon support is second-class.

Cool, I've been looking for this as well.

> unadulterated reverse-chronological order

This is a wonderful phrase. It's hilarious and strange what we've come to value in a feed. What else might we now be taking for granted that ad companies are going to fuck up?

There's nothing about reverse chronological order that makes it innately better for listing things, or better or worse for advertisers. Even for a feed, there are good arguments for and against different orderings depending on both the data and who you are. As one obvious example, most people prefer forum software with threaded views of discussions to strictly chronological listings of messages.

Probably most relevant in Twitter's case is that if your feed contains more stuff than you can get to quickly, any curation is probably more useful than simply missing the things that came first or the things that came last. This is why, for example, people who receive a large volume of email often like prioritization or rule-based organization features in their email clients. Like I said, this might not be your situation and a reverse chronological feed might be better for you, but it's not like it's inherently superior. Like so many design choices, it's a trade-off.

And of course you can show ads with a feed no matter what order the feed is in.

Yeah, you're right. Like @enkiv2 said, it's really about control. If the user controls ordering and filtering, any old order is fine. I think the reason plain old reverse-chronological seems notable is because most people who use feeds are using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and/or Snapchat, where the user isn't in control.

Even if these services offered sorting options (most don't, I think), the default is an optimization for time-on-site. Which is to say, when most people's experience of feeds is being manipulated by them, boring old reverse chronological sticks out.

I'd say "your notification tray", but it seems like the majority has already lost that one.

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