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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

I follow a few hundred people with very varied interests, and I don't log in every few minutes. For non-addicted people, the algo is pretty nice. I want to see a sampling of interesting stuff I "missed" over the last day or two. If I want to go look at a particular person's chronological feed, I can do that.

You can change it if you don't like it, click the sparkle button to do so, but don't think nobody likes it.

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Try doing that, and find out how many times Twitter helpfully resets you to go back 'home' - a home which they feel they own and control. I press that button about once a week to go back to a chronological feed.

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.

Once a week? Lucky you, I have to set it to "Latest Tweets" almost every time I open the app. It even reminds me to set my "Content Preferences" every time I do it, just to ignore them over and over again. Helpful.

Aha! So I wasn't crazy that Twitter was changing back to their algorithmic feed every so often

Have you ever tried Twitter lists? I find that having separate streams for "irl friends", "professional network", "people I might want to hire", etc. makes it easy to dip in, get a sense of what's up with that particular set of people/accounts, and then go about my day.

The "sparkle setting" resets if you haven't been on Twitter Web for a while, even if you always keep up with Twitter on mobile.

I use Twitter Web so infrequently that whenever I open it, it has always changed back to the "Top Tweets" view.

Even on the new Twitter Web UI it automatically changes back from "Latest Tweets" to "Home", although I visit the site several times per day.

If only Twitter had separate URLs for the two styles, then I could just update my bookmark...

https://tweetdeck.twitter.com always stays chronological.

What you said is ok, and it's fine if that's the default. What people complain about is that you can't opt-out of the algorithmic timeline.

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