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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I'm the only person in the world who likes the "algorithmic" feed.

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.

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The problem isn't with reordering the timeline. It's that the algorithmic timeline will insert all kinds of total garbage posted by people I don't follow into the timeline. The real timeline is easy to curate. Just follow people who post interesting things, then unfollow people who turn out to tweet too much about things you have no interest in. The algorithmic timeline makes that impossible.

I actually like these recommendations. Then again I mainly use Twitter to look for arts, so it's less important that a tweet is posted by someone I follow or not.

> I feel like I'm the only person in the world who likes the "algorithmic" feed.

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.

> This is a strange article because Twitter is still giving the chronological fans what they want.

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.

The perhaps obvious additional downside of this is, with each iteration of "no really, trust us that you want our view," your setting is also cleared / changed / moved. Yet more friction to prevent you getting your desired view (which, to your point, will then not stick anyway).

This was possible way before the algorithmic feed was introduced, via the “tweets you may have missed” section. It bubbled up the relevant ones without adding a ton of recommendation garbage.

> This seems entirely reasonable to me, and if I want to see the rest, I can just keep scrolling.

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.

I do like some elements of the algorithmic feed, like surfacing things that several of my friends like or other interesting tweets from outside my immediate network. But the downside I've noticed is that this view is also far more likely to put contentious or abrasive tweets in front of me, because that's the kind of content that gets "engagement." For me, the rise in blood pressure isn't worth sometimes seeing an interesting tweet.

It's the only way I can use Twitter and for the same reason as you said. I'm not on Twitter all the time, so I only see probably about 1~5% of my full TL. I'd prefer to read "important" ones between my two visits, instead of whatever posted newest.

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.

I like both. When I run out of tweets I switch to 'Home' mode and get to see a whole new slew of things related to people I follow

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