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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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

https://diasporafoundation.org/

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.

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.

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.

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

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