Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed
theverge.com
theverge.com
I added to one of my lists only the accounts that I really want to see on my feed (no old school friends, acquaintances, nor random people that some of the accounts I follow just started following: only sources with added value).
The result? Open your list, and you'll see all the tweets sorted chronologically, only from the accounts you really care to follow.
The quality of the time I spend on Twitter has dramatically increased since this change. No more time wasted scrolling through whatever irrelevant tweets the platform wants me to see. Twitter for me has basically become like an RSS feed aggregator with a curated list of sources to follow, reported in chronological order. And that's exactly what I wanted. Fck their algorithmic sht: I know better than them what I want to read.
With an algorithmic feed, it's probably easier to get biased into thinking that what is shown to you is representative of trends in the rest of the world. (even if we are conscious of the information bubble, our brain probably makes this construction).
If only Twitter had some mechanism like that from the start! It'd be so much more simple!
I don't think anyone's ever made a website that you could just pick who's content you wanted to see though.
I use the reverse-chron feed almost exclusively. Product Management Twitter has devolved into people with 1-2 years of product experience vomiting out threads of "What I've learned" that have zero insight, and because I follow a lot of legit product people, Twitter thinks I want this other stuff. I hate it.
"if you put me in a list, I will block you" is almost certainly about public lists, either because the notifs are noisy or because the list may not be a flattering one.
It is supremely disrespectful to tell other adults what they are and are not allowed to read.
"Just" stop donating content and attention to abusive and disrespectful censorship platforms.
You don't counter abuse with workarounds, you leave and stop being abused.
I'm a relatively new Twitter user and I've been making heavy use of the list functionality. So what's the down side?
In fact, I don't even look at the main feed. I only look at my lists.
You basically have to be a dedicated Twitter user to enjoy it.
Chronological is not the default setting for lists.
You do unfortunately need a twitter developer account. Also fair warning, as far as I know I'm the only current user, but works on my machine™.
None of those things happen in lists.
I think my other new favorite is having to click "more replies" after what, 8 tweets? Garbo.
Been a very good idea these past doomscrolly years.
As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline.
But I can't fathom why seemingly no effort has gone into monetizing a chronological timeline. Why is it's foregone conclusion that it won't work with advertising the way the algorithmic was works?
The issue for them I imagine is retention: with chronological, it's likely that when you visit Twitter the first few messages you see are not interesting and you leave. But if they put a tweet that's popular among your social group in front of you? Odds are that's interesting to you and you stick around a bit longer.
I dislike that, to be clear, but I imagine this is the human behavior for >90% of people.
While it's important to know what tweets a user is interacting with, the personalization option can surface more things as "You might like", "You follow x, and he liked", "Interesting tweet on the topics you follow/might like" and so on. Whether or not you choose to interact with anyone or more of those is a signal, and helps with advertising (if advertising is a question of "What tweet/content you are likely to interact with?"). Other than brands, most twitter influencers, or would-be influencers end up spending money on twitter ads to gain followers.
With a reverse chronological timeline, it's hard to surface those tweets from outside the network without a jarring experience. They also realize the power of defaults and hence they decided to take away the default option.
... when they are created.
Social networks are inherently evil, that's their business model: manipulate users into addiction and serve ads.
How do non-evil social networks look like? They're forums, plain old forums.
But you don't become an ultra trillionaire with PhpBB.
Nowadays they are an evil manipulation mess, but I don't think it is an inherit property of social networks.
Phase 2: profit (through using and abusing their users).
Both steps are written in stone in their business plan on day 1, you just don't know it.
As a user you were still in phase 1.
Similar story with image hosting websites. First they don't have ads and load fast and don't really have image restrictions. Then they start adding restrictions and ads.
Before this, we had centuries of businesses who were sustainable by just charging a fair premium on the goods they sold to their customers, and both sides were happy enough with the transaction to continue.
You'll never get enough traction to break through to the mainstream, unless something radical changes.
What's evil about Mastodon, Matrix, Pleroma, diaspora, etc?
I don't know anyone using any of those networks.
Nothing wrong with showing me, and clearly denoting, a tweet that I might like in between other tweets I browse.
Don't understand this black and white thinking.
Whether or not they show topic data for a particular tweet, they generally have it. I only use the chronological timeline, and I cleared out the interests list a year or two back, but they have built up a profile of hundreds of interests for me.
I suspect forcing the ranked timeline on people is all about a small portion of Twitter juicing their engagement metrics, with no grand cross-team strategy in play.
Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating.
Malls try to balance enabling people to find what they are looking for, but also make sure they don't find it too easily so that people can wonder about and be exposed to as many stores as possible.
If you enter the Dubai Mall from the metro, there's a big sign that points to the left and says "Food Court". You'd get to the food court much faster if you turn right.
I went the other day just to look at a dining table. It was only in the 3rd or 4th showroom. Of course, to get out I had to wander through the majority of like 13 or 14 other showrooms because you pretty much can only take the linear path to get to an exit.
You need to know the name of what you're looking for and then use their kiosks to find where the thing is in the warehouse and just pick it up directly.
This trick turns 1 hour trips through Ikea into 5 minute trips.
The value proposition of the long Ikea walks is the set up rooms showing how the products look in use, allowing you to visualise before you buy. I take a friend and a coffee and take my time at Ikea.
So I went up to a couple salespeople and asked why. They couldn't say why, just that they did have it in stock at this warehouse and they themselves could ship it for X fee.
I don't really get it. They said maybe they were out of stock at the factory or online order fulfillment center. But the pages said they were available.
I doubt it. They are even marked on in store navigation. Example, https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*ZSJ1cE-FjFzNjIVz8l0a4Q.jp...
Wonder if the covid-catalyzed uptake on grocery pickup options will change this in any way. I certainly discovered the joys of making grocery errands much more efficient, to the point where the decided majority of my store runs are pickup-only: I don't waste time navigating the store.
(And hey, the store can show me random products based off ML analysis of my purchase history, win-win.)
There's a reason why refrigerated items are usually at the back: fridges usually face a wall. You can have a shelf at the back sometimes but that's not always possible
Also, for those quick purchases you can always go to somewhere closer, a gas station, etc.
In fact in Europe some places do have the quick purchases right in front of the store so you don't need to go around (Tesco as an example).
Also, why would your eggs be in the dairy section?
I dont know if this is really happening. Grocery stores where I go are fairly static. They change layout once in years and larger one have big signs that tell you where what roughly is.
There was a case a few years ago where a Marriott got fined for blocking outside wifi.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/03/marriott-fin...
No, them renting the room to you - when you'll usually be out of it most of the day - is absolutely how they make money. Maybe in Las Vegas the room rate is a loss leader but your average business hotel is 100% making their profit on the room.
I once stayed at a place that had super, super cheap refreshment rates on the mini-fridge. Cheaper if you got them at a store obviously, but not punishing like most other hotels, less than double the supermarket rate. Guess what? I made them tons of money, it was super convenient, I didn't go out of my way to avoid them.
They would just show me random shit basically irregardless of date.. and that's not at all what I wanted. I found it to be an new source- of sorts. I'm not saying a good one, but at least it was somewhat interesting to may see peoples perspective on some topic. But what I found is it would just show me stuff that could be months old, days old etc instead of prioritizing like.. top day things.
I haven't used it during the russia/ukraine time.. but I can't imagine how wildly inaccurate of a picture you would get if you are viewing stuff completely out of date order. Yeah they put the date on the video.. but that doesn't really help, everything is still all over the place.
For all Reddit's faults- I can at least go there, take a look at some of the top headlines in some subreddits.. and know if I see something it's recent unless I am looking otherwise.
It’s hard to tell that your actions have changed the kind of user who is most engaged until your platform is destroyed and consists of users who barely pay attention and addicts that feed off of each other and not much else (Facebook).
Metrics lie and optimizing for certain performance metrics ends up optimizing for exploiting human weaknesses which is actually somewhat uncommon in the population, which explains the process of optimizing your platform into irrelevance.
Or the simpler explanation is that the chronological timeline isn't actually the preferred setting, outside of a small but vocal minority.
If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all? I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate. If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature.
> As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline.
I don't follow this logic. There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.
you can justify a lot of things with "the silent majority doesn't mind it". the silent majority is tech-illiterate, and there are a lot of things they are indifferent to. if it wasn't for the loud minority, we'd be advancing into the dystopian future at much faster pace.
>I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate.
the overwhelming majority will always use whichever option is the default
>If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature.
that will eventually happen, and when it does, I'm sure I'll read about how that is a good thing
Is this a simple explanation for why the feature automatically turns itself off after a week or two?
> just because the Tweets are ordered differently
This isn't what the feature does. More than half of the content in the algorithmic timeline was not posted or retweeted by someone I follow.
With the algorithmic feed, you could refresh the page at any time and get a different personalized set of posts that make it feel like your feed is more active than it actually is.
If I recall correctly, this was the default. Then they introduced the semi curated algorithmic as a feature. Then replaced chronological and got a ton of backlash. They've been playing a game of capitulation and direction ever since.
> There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.
The chronological timeline is your connected accounts + ads. The algorithmic timeline is the same but also some "suggestions." Ostensibly this makes it harder to immediately separate ad from, say, an account your friend follows.
However I’ve heard of very few people that prefer the algorithmic feed on Twitter, might be a bubble effect though.
The big part is time spent I think. I see the same thing with Instagram: I have about 120 accounts that I follow, mostly friends of mine.
I check the feed once a day and after 5 minutes I’m done.
But I also know quite a lot of people that spend hours on Instagrams explore page and with reels.
With your own carefully curated list there is a limited amount of content you can consume, until you inevitably leave the app.
But as you can see with TikTok or Instagram people spend hours on algorithmic feeds.
I myself tend to stick on Home. However, there are times when I want to be on Latest, particularly if there’s an event on or developments are happening at a rapid pace.
The old UI seemed ideal to me. It gave people the choice to choose what their default was. Now, they’ve taken that away… to what end? Force pushing people over to Home who expressly don’t want it probably isn’t going to work.
Operant conditioning and intermittent reinforcement are why.
What they want to use instead is a different, inferior algorithm (for you, or you wouldn't hate it so much), but which is superior for them. That algorithm is not the only profitable algorithm, it is one of many, your preferred system is also algorithmic. This is just an algorithm that uses a black box nobody understands, or even tries to understand, or even tries to read (which they could, they have access to the weights of the neural net), and consequently, which they can claim to have no responsibility or even power over.
They're actually more heuristics, not algorithms. As such, they have all kinds of failures, many intentional. Algorithms (at least in my book) are generally are air-tight, and verifiable. Like you chronological feed, if two items were out of order, you could see it and it would show the algorithm to be wrong. It would have to lie about the date (which you do see sometimes) to fool you.
These heuristics are really just the man behind the curtain, imposing his will in an algorithmically-amplified way. It is driven by a dual goal of profit and political ambitions, with the latter being weighted more highly.
What if it's actually a way to hide specific topics or sentiments from the timeline? If the algorithm of what to show first is a black box, scales can be tipped just like Google does with search results.
If it's a pure chronological timeline, you either have to be blatant in not displaying the tweets you want to suppress, or let people see them.
With algorithmic timelines the system is deliberately optimizing for "what keeps you on the site", even if it's not new or not something you follow. Hence, you stay on longer and view more ads. There's nothing about chrono that makes advertising less effective; algorithmic timelines just keep people on site and thus keep them as part of your ad inventory.
But then maybe that's my fault for curating my timeline to show creators and not influencers/talking heads...
Simple experiment:
Go to Facebook and use ?sk=h_chr scroll until you "run out" of material, and then check to see if you actually saw all of the recent stuff from a particular friend.
Jokes on them. I block every account that shows promoted tweets and it keeps my timeline ad-free.
I'm actually surprised they don't have promoted tweets override blocklists but hey, if it works.
Personally I'm closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon. Many in my social circle have already done so.
Oh, while I'm at it: if you want to view Twitter posts without having a Twitter account (or just don't want to see ads and trending crap), check out Nitter[1]. Alternative front-end. It also has minimal JS and is far more resource-efficient (viewing my profile loaded 1.56mb of resources on Nitter, compared to 9.2mb on Twitter)
There were none for me.
So, given that mastodon is large, and federated, surely the problem is with me right? So, I said fuck it, let's break out the API. I wrote a scraper, seeded with a few least-bad people's profile, programmed it to pull the last ~32 toots & add all connections of the user to scrape breadth-first to get a wide array of perspectives. ~150 servers & 50,000 toots. I then took my general keyword list (~150 items, representing majority of my interests in both layman and technical terms) that I use to evaluate social networks, and search engines, and crunched through the toots.
Results: deep technical terms have accidental hits, generally used either in different context; or scratching almost none of the surface. Wide terms generally pull very low signal, from the general vicinity of conspiracy theories/how bad twitter is/crypto/mastodon is great.
I'd really really would prefer to actually use Mastodon, but
1, the features they offer optimizes against it's own usage (lack of search, lack of discoverability; you can call this positive change, but again, it optimizes against onboarding & finding interesting stuff)
2, because it's federated, there's no-one dedicated to acquiring people who have better use of their time, and
3, the people who are in there, do not, currently, would lead me to level up in directions I care about.
Mastodon represents a set of preferences, and I'm happy for you that it seems to be aligning with yours; it does not aligns with mine, is all I'm saying.
I did this and I don’t regret it.
A good solution to this problem (and "growth and engagement" at large) is to make advertising-based business models less profitable (with better and enforced privacy regulation, more liability for the ads they run, or losing Section 230 protection for those who manipulate content's reach to maximize "engagement" as opposed to being a neutral communication platform where the user controls which content is shown to them, etc) so that businesses go back to the old model of the user paying for the service, aligning the incentives of the platform with what the users want.
It would be much easier if they allowed to display mutliple accounts at same time, since they allow it separately anyway already
The availability of the chronological timeline is the only reason why Twitter still works for me and Facebook and LinkedIn don't. I keep seeing the same shit on the latter two, despite extensive attempts to train the recommender engine.
Facebook just keeps showing me the same posts over and over again. LinkedIn shows different posts, but they are all so cookie cutter similar that they might as well have been the same. And even more insipid, it will do a repeat of network updates at two weeks and four weeks. Nothing says "we got interesting content" more than reruns!
I'm soooo looking forward to Twitter being uninteresting repeats as well.
> But when I force close and re-open the app when looking at the Latest Tweets column, the Home feed is what Twitter shows first.
Great. Choose between keeping the app always-on or having boring shit first.
I fear the cookie-cutter similarity of business communications isn't something LinkedIn will be able to fix.
Banality is a borderline essential component of business communications.
I absolutely loathe LinkedIn; it's the social network I resent the most.
Just use one of the 3th party twitter clients… problem solved.
I use “Aviary - for Twitter” on iOS which has no subscription, unlike Tweetbot.
The userscript also fixes the reverse-chronological issue. There's literally a setting that enables one to force "Latest Tweets First" mode, so it'll switch back to the "latest" feed whenever Twitter has decided that you should be viewing their "home" feed instead.
Very good addition: it can also hide engagement counts (replies, RTs and likes), so you can scroll sanely without feeling obliged to like a stupid tweet just because it has 100 likes already.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimaltwitte...
I think I'm experiencing a bug like this one here:
https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2/issues/33
i'll look into it
In theory I follow few enough people to be able to sit down and read every tweet - I rarely want to. The magical "algorithm" seems to do a reasonable job of raising tweets with high activity, or tweets from people I often interact with, to the top.
This seems entirely reasonable to me, and if I want to see the rest, I can just keep scrolling.
Perhaps it is more of a problem if you follow hundreds of people. But I don't do that, and if I did, I'd never be able to read everything anyway.
You're not alone. I've switched back and forth but the algorithm wins every time for me. For me, the biggest downside of the chronological feed is that it is dominated by people who Tweet the most, which is an obvious outcome of pure chronological ordering.
The algorithmic feed seems to do a good job of showing me Tweets from people I've interacted with or whose Tweets I've liked. It's good at surfacing Tweets from people I follow who rarely Tweet while effectively rate-limiting the Tweets from the excessive Tweeters that I follow.
This is a strange article because Twitter is still giving the chronological fans what they want. I have no doubt that chronological feed is a rarely used feature and in 2022 it's guaranteed that Twitter has analytics to back up this decision.
They definitely aren't doing that. The problem isn't that we disagree with the default, but that Twitter will not allow users to consistently switch back to the real timeline. The setting does not stick. They are constantly resetting it back; used to be that it could reset back multiple times per day. Now it happens maybe every month or two. (And of course also on every new device).
And now this change is even worse, at least according to the article. There will be no way to show the real timeline when opening the app, you'll always get the algorithmic view and have to manually switch. This really is not what anyone wants.
If only that were actually so!
Back when I still bothered using twitter, I only followed a few friends, and read every single tweet, and yet the algorithmic feed seemed to make me entirely miss some. Not sure how that occured exactly, whether it was outright dropping them or making them difficult to find by pushing below older ones I've 'already read' and would stop scrolling on. Either way, as someone who indeed tried to just read everything, the default feed is a mess.
The other fundamental problem was that when people made references to some discussion or event, the out-of-order timeline made it impossible to follow what was happening.
I totally respect that some people just like the default feed, but for some of us it's completely unusable. It would not hurt you at all if the simple chronological timeline was an optional feature, but it does hurt me that it isn't.
And the lists are still reverse-chronological so if I need to see specific things in order I can still find them.
With that said, this change is very backward. The old UI is already perfect, everyone gets what they want.
Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust.
Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube on every video view, and I can't even speak Chinese.
You can easily be shadowbanned by Twitter for complaining about Twitter on Twitter.
They send you accounts fake and delayed notices to drive engagement.
Muting words and phrases has not worked for years.
They interact with other apps and track words you type and use them to push content and ads to you, likely even when you have the setting for third party data disabled.
The interest keywords associated with your account cannot be changed, it is a pool of data gathered from people you follow and what you've typed over the life of running you account, it often locks you into an information bubble that dictates everything you see for the life of each account, and it also ensures that each use has a customized (yet individually/uniquely frustrating) experience that can't properly be explained nor replicated by any other user.
If this gets any worse I will just in frustration stop using the platform.
You are lucky! I obviously share IP at home with my children, but how is my 13 years old daughter getting disgusting commercials (all in Portuguese for some reason??) of "Manscape" products, women's "spray everywhere even there" deodorant, some soap where interracial couple does everything other than THAT under the shower... and few others jaw-droppers I honestly forgot by now. And tons and tons of crypto spam. I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore?? has to be some bot fishing for keywords and nude, if none, then approve.
> I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore??
There's no liability, so why should they waste money on reviewing ads manually?
Hypothesis: Ads are related to browsing habits, your kid's asking questions
So it's probably just a matter of time before this route is plugged.
[0] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter
The only small criticism that I have is that there is no button or keyboard shortcut to quickly disable it in the case that I actually need one of the disabled features). For that you can quickly bring up Firefox' addons dialog via Ctrl+Shift+A though, to disable the addon completely.
But I don’t understand how anyone uses their website or the official client. If it wasn’t for a third-party client I think I’d give up pretty fast.
I absolutely would not use Twitter if I had to use the website.
Just the stuff I want to see in the order it was tweeted.
With https://github.com/haoict/twitter-no-ads and https://repo.packix.com/package/com.alwayslatesttimelinetwit...
all I want is to follow specific people and see their tweets in chronological order. I don't want it shuffled, i don't care what they've liked, I don't care what who follows them is tweeting (if I did, i would be following them).
Also, it's creepy there is no "disable" or "stop" functionality. Everything is "See less often". No, I don't want to see it EVER.
Traditional forums allow messages to be disseminated widely to readers who potentially have no out-of-band context. But they have enough in-band context to enable productive conversations: (1) there's a thread title and an original post which everyone generally reads, (2) all messages in a thread are visible to everyone, and (3) longer messages are supported.
Short messages of a sentence or two are insufficient to convey much information without context, but can be very useful with context: "Sure, 6 sounds good". SMS and messaging apps work fine because messages are displayed in the context of a conversation, and dissemination is limited to known recipients who generally have some out-of-band context.
But twitter provides little or no in-band context, messages are too short to stand on their own without context, and messages are disseminated to a global user base which has no out-of-band context. You'd expect that to be a recipe for a dumpster fire.
It is, as it has always been, a banal protocol trying to dress up as an impressive product.
As a bonus, no ads.
Mind you, I can absolutely see that activity on Twitter has only been going up recently. Which would be great if 80% of it wasn’t self-promotion, crypto babble and spam, plagiarized content, and LinkedIn style “expert” threads.
On top of that, all of the promoted tweets I see are junk content farms.
It hasn’t been an ideal place for connecting with friends for a while, and now it’s becoming an absolute shit hole for decent content or professional communities. What will be left?
Also, the chronological timeline is not ideal once you follow > 100 profiles. One of the issues at hand here is that they removed the “missed” section and replaced with the algorithmic feed. There is no way to catch up with only the most interesting tweets from people you follow, other than scrolling through all of it.
> other than scrolling through all of it.
What do you want? Do you want all latest tweets, or do you want AI to generate a list of good ones?
AI is not inherently evil. Yes, I want to see the most relevant / controversial / liked tweets by people I follow. Most of that doesn't need any complex algorithm in the first place.
What I don't want to see are bubble-inducing "recommended" tweets, or tweets liked by someone I follow (isn't that what retweets are for?), or "topics", or "people you should follow". If I wanted an AI-curated feed I'd just go to facebook or read the news.
I guess there must be some (presumably big) audience that likes the algorithm, but for Twitter to derive value for me it must have this element of predictability that the mechanically chronological timeline and properly threaded conversations brings.
no ads. chronological. none of this 'trending' nonsense in the sidebar. there is no sidebar. it's wonderful.
The app now has a tab bar on top with Home and Latest Tweets.
Also props for letting you to just straight block in the normal way the account behind an ad you see.
(Tweetbot is my choice, fwiw.)
(For instance, voting on polls is still official-client-only, but you can see polls in Tweetbot and it gives you a link to the first-party client so you can vote.)
Where I live I’m quite the outlier for using Twitter, very few people use it. Most that do work in tech.
Is that different in other parts of the world? Is Twitter mainstream social media that almost everyone you know has?
Probably hear most people talk about faceboook though.
I know a few of the people I follow on Twitter but not many that live anywhere near me.
2. Add people
3. Read as reverse chronological feed without ads.
I follow around 400 accounts, constantly adding and removing accounts. My chronological feed used to be a steady stream of content that I couldn't keep up with. Nowadays I can go for hours without a new tweet appearing in my feed. If I go to the algorithmic feed (or when Twitter randomly sends me back there) there's a huge unending stream of content, but if you pay attention to the dates on the tweets, lots of them are 4+ days old.
Twitter is a dying platform and the algorithmic feed has two goals. First and foremost it's to keep you scrolling. But secondly it's to mask just how dead the platform is.
Twitter began rolling out its algorithmic timeline in 2016 (to much fanfare), and in 2018 introduced the spark icon, which allows you to switch between algorithmic and reverse timeline feeds. To me, the spark seemed like a reasonable way to coexist with the Home and Latest timelines, but with the change announced on Thursday, Twitter appears to be pushing users towards the algorithmic feed. Instagram, on the other hand, is experimenting with reporting the chronological flow of its users.