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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely hate Facebook, but I think Snap is really getting 'social media' right. There's no political nonsense or advertising being shoved down my throat, just endless cat videos and memes from my friends the way it should be. When my friends post something, it's guaranteed I will see it. There are options for group chat and 'forum' style communication, but the core experience is intimate and private. They're doing all the right things IMO (for now).

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Snap separated out the sponsored stuff into a different section from your friends and gives you full control of the communication area, which IMO is much better than what Facebook is doing with "recommended for you" nonsense popping into my Instagram feed.

There's probably a lot of interesting sponsored content, but if I want to just use it as a chat app it doesn't get in the way. That's the big advantage that Apple has with iMessages, no pressure to make a worse service for users in order to turn a profit. We'll see if Snap can manage to do it without driving their users off to the next one.

This fundamental property of "show me only things from people I explicitly added, and show me everything they post (ideally in reverse chronological order)" is what many (myself included) seem to want from social media.

Sadly, it seems to be directly at odds with what companies want, because social networks often start off with having that property and lose it as they need to make the investors happy.

- Facebook -> hasn't been true in a looooong time

- Instagram -> hasn't been true in a few years

- Twitter -> I think it's not true anymore? Might be if you click the right options in your settings, but who knows for how long

Snapchat's new update makes this not true. Your friends tab is ranked by an algorithm, and is no longer in reserve chronological order.

Yeah, Twitter switched to an algorithmic feed in 2016 [1]. There is an option to turn off "Show the best Tweets first," but I don't know if that will actually cause the entire feed to be chronological.

An annoying thing about Twitter that I experienced recently is I started getting notifications for "top Tweets." I had to tell Twitter multiple times that I didn't want them before they stopped (there was no option to put an immediate stop to them).

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/technology/personaltech/p...

There is no way that I've found to turn off Twitter things like trying to recommend people to follow, or things I might've missed. I cancel them every time and get the "We'll show this less often" response, but cannot get them to just never show again. It's baffling that they go out of their way to frustrate long term users.

Yeah twitter still messes up the order even with all the settings right. Have to resort to using tweetbot just to catch stuff. It’s insane.

The other annoying new feature in Twitter is the notifications for missed tweets or summaries. I mean, there is a reason I've missed those tweets. I don't want to be taken into the past. If I need to, I'll scroll a hundred times and visit the past. Please show me the latest tweets on my page without any notifications or other distractions, preferably sorted by the importance of people I follow.

Importance = function (frequency of me retweeting or liking this person's tweets, duration of follow)

To add a voice for the other side of it - I've found those quite useful. I follow people all over the world and live in London. When I have a look at twitter in the morning I actually like that it'll show me (some) tweets from people I follow in the US or Asia that I would've easily missed. I can't say for sure but it seems to prioritise them in some way based on my previous interactions or how many times the tweet in question was interacted with overnight.

Perspectives :). I don't like this feature for exactly the same reason. I wake up in the morning and there is a deluge of notifications since most of the people I follow are in the opposite timezone.

But...FOMO... - Said the Product team

Instagram still only shows me posts from users I've followed. It's no longer in reverse chronological order as of about 18 months ago, which is unfortunate.

What I would really want for Instagram to allow me to select certain users to show their posts first. Facebook lets me do this.

> This fundamental property of "show me only things from people I explicitly added, and show me everything they post (ideally in reverse chronological order)" is what many (myself included) seem to want from social media.

> Sadly, it seems to be directly at odds with what companies want

There is a companyless protocol for this exact functionality, RSS.

True but sadly my friends do not post pictures of their babies and vacations through RSS :(

Maybe a user-friendly, differential-privacy RSS feed-powered platform is what we need.

Mastodon?

Invite only blogs perhaps. That's basically facebook though. [0]

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1367/

Seems a little more like livejournal than facebook?

Twitter used to have an RSS feed for users that you followed. So oldskool private Twitter accounts would be kind of similar too.

Remember Diaspora? I'd forgotten them too. Apparently they support Atom (close enough to RSS?)

https://diasporafoundation.org/

algorithmic sorting increases monetization opportunities by several orders of magnitude, that's why they do it. Just fiddle with the algorithm to decrease reach of a certain group of users, then make those users pay for extra reach. Voila! You have a new revenue stream now. Facebook has showed that that's the winning monetization formula for social media.

Twitter does have a way to see chronological tweets: by using Tweetdeck

I have never used facebook or snapchat but this is what drove me off of linkedin too, it used to be 100% updates from people I knew, and somehow morphed into 99% "news feed" crap that I never want to see, ever.

I don't care what your analytics say about user engagement, they are wrong. Just stop the "relevancy game" and the stupid news feeds everywhere.

I think we need an add-on to Zawinski's law, "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail." These days, every program seems to expand until it includes an unwanted news feed.

So true, it’s impossible to see what I truly want to see on FB and LinkedIn - updates from people that I care about in reverse chronological order!

I do think compared to Facebook, Snapchat has been slow to open up their platform. I think that has actually helped Snap as I don’t know that the ways in which Facebook has opened up it’s platform has contributed much in terms of value to the share price.

Just the content from people you're directly connected to.

What a novel approach to online socializing, said IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ...

I forget though, that SV and places like Ycom can't resell old tech to investors.

Pets.com taught us you have to just keep cranking out the hits, or they'll get wise to the hollow value really being proposed.

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