Yeah, no thanks. Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? A couple of times a year they'll opt everybody back into whatever crappy experiment they're running ("hey, we'll put some posts to your feed based on likes") and it'll take ages to remember just how to turn it off.
The same reason you do anything - they’ll take their business elsewhere unless you provide service and support in the way they want it.
People don’t like being told to go away and follow some other procedure when they have a problem.
Might as well tell them they should avoid having any problems requiring support while you’re at it - that’ll make it even easier for you.
If you want to control your brand perception you don't want the first result when people look for your brand on Twitter to be people tweeting about how terrible you are.
The reasons to do support on Twitter have less to do with what's tech support needs and more with marketing and controlling your brand perception.
Go to your customers if you can. Don’t force them to come to you unless you have to.
Unfortunately, the Telstra CSAs on Twitter aren't actually allowed to do anything useful so they mostly direct me to other, more useless support channels.
And in the US especially, companies hate having to support users, which is why they are also pushing for AI support instead of actually having a human there.
Think about it, when is the last time you had an issue with some Bay Area Saas company and could call them on the phone to get support, like you'd do with a bank?
And if you're the only game in town with your own little walled garden, and everyone in your industry has entirely automated (read: low opex) support, where's the incentive to do better?
If I have a specific support request about my personal account, I'll go through the usual channels. But if it's on twitter, it's probably there because the extra visibility and public accountability is intentional.
Exactly. Social networks moved support from private, hidden systems to a public channel. This benefitted the user, since the brand has more to lose from interactions that are negative, non-responsive, re-directive, etc.
Note that the poster said "an official support channel" rather than "the official support channel". Adding more ways for customers to contact support is usually a good thing. There was no mention of taking away other channels that you might prefer.
That notification was actually what slowly made me an active Twitter user, because they kept surfacing me interesting content and giving me a reason to come back and it became a gateway for me to discover other great content on Twitter
I like HN. But I never look at particular users' posts. I just look at the front page, or sometimes at the comments list, so see what people are talking about.
I think for it to work people would have to start blocking more and using more mute words.
The thing where someone retweets something horrible because they disagree with it is so wrong and is what is being badly gamed.
It's funny. For all that I support free speech, I don't have the patience to read much of it. So I end up gravitating to well moderated forums.
Bundle it under "experimental" or "advanced features" in an easy to use page with a very clear explanation of what each feature does.
I think opt-out makes sense though, for users who don't a feature.
Features that will go viral are worth adding for all, features that did not can be kept there.
Twitter very likely did market research on its effectiveness for the target market they were trying to please. Probably that's just not you.
I want to turn them off completely.
I've taken to just unfollowing the users who they force notifications from.
Even though sometimes I'm generally interested in the user's content, I'll view it when I feel like it, not when Twitter wants me to.
What really clogs up my notifications is when other people “like” a post I’m mentioned in. You get a few ‘runaway’ threads that pull on a few dozen people and every like becomes its own notification. A dozen people each liking a dozen tweets on the thread, the notification timeline becomes absolutely useless.
Let me mute all likes (potentially keeping likes only for my own tweets).
If they ever fully disable 3rd party clients that will be the day I cancel my account. I thought forced ads as you started a DVD were obnoxious...
"Fully disable" - probably not. But they'll certainly make it nearly impossible to produce something "like the Twitter app but better".
My approach is now to unfollow any user when Twitter forces a notification from them. Maybe someone with some brains at Twitter will notice the clear pattern and fix their idiotic notifications.
You can change it if you don't like it, click the sparkle button to do so, but don't think nobody likes it.
I don't log in every few minutes - every few hours perhaps on a good day, but have no interest in an algorithmic feed - a scrolling chronological feed is just fine.
There are very good reasons they forced us all onto this algorithm, and they are not in your interest - it means they can insert content whenever they like, and make posters pay for it. You may be happy with it now, but I doubt you would be long term when it becomes pay to play.
I use Twitter Web so infrequently that whenever I open it, it has always changed back to the "Top Tweets" view.
If only Twitter had separate URLs for the two styles, then I could just update my bookmark...
Research keeps showing that for users to "trust" software then they need to have an understanding of why something is being presented to them. It is one of the biggest barriers with recommendation systems.
For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive result, you'll never see that.
But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that probably gets counted as "engagement".
"twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good, otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!"
case closed my circular dude
It's not a very good metric for measuring actual usefulness to users at all though.
We need a business model for social media where incentives for companies and their users actually line up.
"nonprofit" is not code for "zero revenue"
Min maxed “user engagement” is almost certainly a net negative for society at large
Usually I just want to just use a service to consume specific things and then move onto some other activity, but each one is aware of the attention economy and trying to keep me in for as long as possible.
You have just described an algorithm, I believe.
>> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn.
What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time.
Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement.
That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.
I configured twitter to keep tweets in chronological order and not to filter anything, so I only see tweets from accounts I follow, and I see all their tweets, and see them in chron. order.
What he wants to do is copy reddit. I can't see what they could add to reddit, but they'd completely lose what twitter is good at (following people).
That's ridiculous. Is topic vs author the only metric we use to categorize social media? What about thread flatness, delegation of curation/censorship and styling, quantitative and qualitative distinctions about how feeds are tailored to users, etc.? I can think of many distinctions between the two despite rarely using either.
I've had this happen, typically with interjections of sport commentary, and I will immediately unfollow them. None of the unfollows has been a great loss. People who are truly insightful have enough self-awareness not to self-indulge like this.
Bizarre interpretation.
It's the version of Twitter targeted at newsrooms, etc.
I assume a lot of people already know and have reasons why they don't... but likely not everyone here has tried it so it may be worth repeating.
I had heard of Tweetdeck, but I assumed that it was a third-party client which provided a better experience and was therefore at odds with Twitter's interests. You're telling me that, not only is Twitter okay with it, but that they built it?
It was independent then Twitter bought it.
There were alternatives before such as Seesmic, no idea how they work now, if they still do.
> And while Dorsey said he’s less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing “what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it,” Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it’s a public company, with a business model based on advertising.
I'm fairly certain that Anderson's expectation here is probably true, and that Dorsey is at best disconnected from the reality of how Twitter's business operates if he's not being outright disingenuous. The number of ads shown increases with the amount of time spent using the service, and assuming there is some business unit within Twitter tasked with increasing revenue, that business unit will likely attempt to increase time spent using the service. Inserting this extra garbage and preventing users from disabling it serves that purpose because it makes it more difficult to tell when you've reached posts you've already read and forces you to scroll longer to reach them.
Well now you know why you're seeing what you're seeing.
Are programmers supposed to be some apolitical hyper-rational cohort?
Then I talked to some people who were on the receiving end of the kind of programmers that don't care about those things, groan when they hear words like "feminism", "intersectionality" or "diversity" and instead believe in "meritocracy" and "rationality".
Now I'm one of those programmers who tweet about politics and feminism.
Sometimes you need to be confronted with the pain you've been complicit to in order to figure out why the people around you all seem to disagree with you and make such a fuss about stuff you don't care about.
When you follow stuff associated with the right, it often gets unfollowed. This was very noticeable with the movie Unplanned. Basically you couldn't follow it.
If you start off a new account by following only politicians on the right, you are highly likely to get your account banned.
I'd say "liberal" is a more accurate descriptor than "left-leaning". I'd call PewDiePie liberal but not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination, for example.
In my experience, people who assume that eventually progress to assuming that those are actually one and the same.
It generalizes.
My interests are @thisdude and @thatchick. That's why it's called "social."
I don't follow too many people so it just fills up my timeline with a little more stuff, otherwise it would be rather stale.
Do you not realize the massive avenue for abuse? How about come election time and the impossible scenario where your "curators" don't agree with your opinions?
Google, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit are already creating/supporting bubbles. How would you know if you are in one?
It didn't begin like this, but I'd say it's there now. But I use Twitter not as a social tool, but as a tool to follow things and artists I'm interested in.
For example, I follow lots of lowpoly, pixelart and indy-dev accounts. With some frequency I get in my feed someone that is followed by those accounts, or something one of those accounts liked. It tends to be something also related to that community (pixelart artists follow other pixelart artists, etc) so I like the post. Sometimes I check the account, see their feed, and end up following it. I'm not sure if that's how most others use twitter, but that's how I use it mostly, and it's worked out pretty well.
I think Dorsey is trying to blow smoke up our ass on the other issues, because their core business is advertising no matter what he says, but I actually believe him on this and think it's one of the few really good things he's sincerely trying to do (though I doubt he'll succeed, unfortunately). Echo chambers are poison to good discourse, democracy, philosophy, humanism, and humanity in general. I strongly believe Brexit is monumentally and egregiously terrible, a result of some of our worst and most base instincts in many cases, but if you think Brexit backers don't deserve a fair seat at the discourse table, don't be surprised when that accomplishes the polar opposite of your desired goals.
Farage is not a moron he is dangerous nationalist stirring up violence for personal gain. Just as the "crank" end of the labour party has its own dangerous individuals.
That said, I like following people because one of my interests is people.
Not to mention Jack/Twitter's co-founder Evan Williams has a company called Medium that literally does just that.
I rarely search but isn't that what hashtags solve?
I think changes could be good but history says it will be worse.
Basically if they actually let users see the data they are holding onto.
Judging by the amount of alt-right nonsense that gets promoted to me despite my complete disinterest I'd say they're fucking delighted.