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Comment by toephu2 | Hacker News Reader

> Return to a reverse chronological time

They've had this for years. Press the "swish" (stars) button top right.

The problem with this approach is that they frequently revert you back to algorithmic order.

edit: to everyone saying that this doesn't happen anymore, thanks for the clarification! i guess i stopped fighting the algorithm back when this wasn't the case.

Social media sites do this because all their stats show that users actually ‘like’ non chronological order even when they say they don’t. Telling people what they want when they ask for something else is a big nono, so they just change it for you on the sly.

Of course, the main way they measure ‘liking’ the site is via engagement, which may actually just measure compulsion to use, not enjoyment. And, of course, the however small, cohort of people who genuinely ‘like’ chronological order are ignored.

My guess was actually that it's more efficient to show users a bunch of popular, cached content than it is to show them a truly chronological timeline full of new and unpopular content, which is unlikely to hit their cache so readily.

If social networks worked like TV and there were only a few popular channels / pieces of content, sure.

But algorithmic feeds are endlessly unique and composing them is vastly more difficult than doing chronological order.

Isn't each individual person a "channel"?

I kind of doubt that it's a caching issue. Twitter feels a lot like email to me -- sending a tweet is a lot like emailing to a group of followers. (Though it's unlikely they implement it that way because of the number of tweets that go unread.) Email providers operate at a scale similar to Twitter and don't replace your email with popular emails to increase cache hits.

Maybe to improve profitability you'd want to improve how much you can serve out of memory, but I think Twitter has more than enough compute to just generate your page for you when you visit. (I haven't seen a fail whale for over a decade!)

> sending a tweet is a lot like emailing to a group of followers. (Though it's unlikely they implement it that way because of the number of tweets that go unread.)

My understanding (from a watching a Twitter Tech talk, maybe about redis?) is that that is actually how it is (was) implemented. They were so focussed on time to first render, they took the efficiency hit.

Most people wanting chronological quickly find out they don't really like it anyways, is my guess. Most twitter users I see now follow over a thousand people, scrolling through all that every day is impossible, it needs to be curated somehow.

That seems far from impossible actually. Especially if you consider the likelihood of all of their followers posting even once per day. You can scroll pretty quickly if it never stops.

> Social media sites do this because all their stats show that users actually ‘like’ non chronological order even when they say they don’t.

I think the issue is a little deeper: it's not that people want chronological vs. non-chronological timelines, it's that they want a way to get the "best", "most relevant" content to be surfaced from those timelines and presented in a sane way. Non-chronological timelines are better at producing the "best", content (for some relative definition of "best", at least), but by presenting it out-of-order, it requires more of the user.

Even beyond "compulsion", it might just take longer to see what I want to see because there is other junk mixed in. If they are just measuring how long I scrolled and how many ads I accidentally clicked in the processed, they might be measuring inefficiency and mistaking it for engagement.

Hence instead should just be url, like /latest. Bookmark it, occasionally check mainline when bored.

Making the UX worse so it takes a longer time and more clicks to get what you want out of a site could look like improved engagement. What if I just want to quickly check-in, see what's new, then bounce?

I certainly engage with content more when 'the algorithm' shows it to me repeatedly, which is what happens on Twitter. Of course I don't necessarily like that.

I have a deep hunch that it gets far stupider even than measuring compulsion.

Suppose that your feed refreshes itself while you're trying to read a particular tweet. You go back looking for it--now badly ordered, irrelevant content is positively correlated with your amount of scrolling and time spent in-app.

So the app isn't just optimizing against your lazy attention, it's probably in some cases also rewarding itself for actively hindering you.

These software patterns are anti-human. Imagine using a hammer that is trying to maximize your engagement with the hammer itself. Well, I know I'll be more engaged with the hammer if the head keeps falling off, but that isn't what a hammer is for.

I have literally never had it reset.

It happens to me once in a blue moon. Enough that I know the folks complaining aren't making things up, but yet something is different between their setup and my own.

It usually takes me a few minutes to notice. I'll see a tweet that I recognize from a previous session, or from someone I don't follow, or something like that.

I have it reset just about every day.

Perhaps I'm on the wrong end of Twitter's A/B testing.

It's reset on me 6 times across two accounts. I know because I complained ... on Twitter

It used to happen every ~5 days, it did for at least a year. It hasn't reset for me for months though, I guess they stopped doing that.

I set my timeline to chronological order years ago and have never had this issue.

I set it two years ago too, and then a couple months ago they changed the app and again tried to foist it on me twice. I changed back twice, and had it changed once again - this last time seems to have stuck. I have another Twitter account (newer) that I don't log into frequently and it's happened on that one 3 times for a total of 6 between my two accounts. Oddly, I have one biz account that's never changed.

it’s not chronological until you disable retweets and adverts - i use a plug-in to ensure this - makes it much better.

I think it stopped doing that a year or two ago, certainly I can't remember the last time I had to change back to chrono order.

I've been using twitter for years and had no idea this was an option. This is clearly deliberate - the option is nowhere in the settings menu, where one would look for this. The star icon gives no indication it is even clickable, and does not communicate "sort order". There are fairly standard icons for that.

It's in the same place it was for Facebook.

Many of us don't use Facebook.

I only learned what the "Sparkle Button" (that really does appear to be its actual name) does the other week in an article discussing its terrible design too. Instantly earned a spot in my personal UX Hall of Shame.

Click the "Sparkle Button" to change the timeline sort algorithm. Right, totally obvious...

>Click the "Sparkle Button" to change the timeline sort algorithm. Right, totally obvious...

Holy crap, I can actually use Twitter again. Thanks.

Every time I have made a twitter account, I have seen a box along the lines of "Viewing your Home feed. For the latest tweets, switch to Latest."

I think in this case it might be that you clicked through a pretty hard to miss box.

I did not. The algorithmic feed was not an option when I joined twitter. They were still basically a group sms system, and probably still running on Rails! Also I was not given the option to switch to it when it became available. They just switched everyone.

> They just switched everyone.

It also appeared on multiple of my accounts that were made before the switch, so this hypothesis also seems wrong.

People tend to not create new Twitter accounts all the time.

It also appeared on multiple of my accounts that were made before the switch, so that also is irrelevant.

a) Why would it be in the Settings menu ? For many of us it's a feature you change multiple times a day whilst using the app.

b) The icon is exactly the same style as all of the other icons in the app. If you couldn't work out that the picture is clickable how did you know how to search or access messages. I'm actually confused how you use any mobile app given they mostly all have this style.

c) It is not a traditional sort ordering though. Using the curated mode brings in entirely new content into the feed that is not in chronological e.g. followed topics, recommended topics, greater emphasis on retweets.

We have to remember that a lot of people who criticize twitter don't actually use twitter.

This happens so often with so many things.

Facebook: "I haven't used Facebook in 10 years, and never bothered to unfollow things on my feed back then, but it sucks! The feed is just garbage!"

SNL: "I haven't watched SNL since the 90s. It hasn't been funny in years!"

Expensive restaurants: "I went to one Michelin star place in 2007 and it was like 3 bites of food! I don't know why people bother!"

Your examples are still straw men.

I do occasionally have the misfortune of using twitter - sometimes a link is posted or sent to me, or I am curious if something specific is trending. It sucks ass and is unenjoyable in my opinion - the worst when someone tries to use it as a full blown blogging platform. It seems designed to exploit certain triggers for compulsive content consumption.

There are numerous similar testimonials of people that still regularly use twitter if not compulsively, so the straw men are irrelevant.

You use twitter in a different way than the vast majority of users.

Twitter users follow people and see their posts. Their feeds are mostly their followers posts.

You ever look at the youtube home page when you're logged out? It's absolute garbage. It's also not the way most people use youtube.

> You use twitter in a different way than the vast majority of users.

Can you actually back this up with any evidence, because I don't buy it off hand. You're saying it's uncommon for a huge long tail of rare users and lurkers that just casually drop in to twitter to see some one off post/conversation from an aggregator or their friend sent them, or post/DM bitch to a company that fucked them? I have a twitter account, I have a handful of followers (all likely from more than 5 years ago), but I hardly use twitter enough to even care. And I don't think this is that rare.

> You ever look at the youtube home page when you're logged out? It's absolute garbage. It's also not the way most people use youtube.

I don't follow your point. Most people use youtube by following links from aggregators such as reddit or here. They don't actively participate in the youtube "community" with its cesspool of comments nor even subscribe (what is it - like 3 to 5 subscribers per 1000 views) - that is hardly the "vast majority".

> Most people use youtube by following links from aggregators such as reddit or here.

That's a strong assertion. You have any data to back it up?

> They don't actively participate in the youtube "community" with its cesspool of comments nor even subscribe (what is it - like 3 to 5 subscribers per 1000 views) - that is hardly the "vast majority".

I think you're right about the comments and even subscriptions, but you're entirely skipping the "algorithmic" way of using YouTube, which is using the suggested videos on the homepage like the person you were replying to alluded to, as well as the related videos. Also, searching.

YouTube can and will suggest new videos from channels it has decided you like on the homepage whether you're subscribed to them or not. It will also put them in the related videos, even if they're unrelated to the video you're currently watching.

>Most people use youtube by following links from aggregators such as reddit or here.

Huh? This is blatantly false. Link aggregators are not as large as you think. People go on youtube.com and watch the videos there, or check out their subscriptions, or use the search bar in youtube.

> We have to remember that a lot of people who criticize twitter don't actually use twitter.

And yet its influence on media I do consume is undeniable. I dont think there are many journalists not on twitter

Sure, but what percentage of users know about it? Of those, what percentage remember it?

Defaults matter! Most people will just see the default state of things and not be too curious about ways they could change things, and never even notice this sort of setting.

And on top of that, like Facebook did long ago with its chronlogical timeline setting, it resets itself back to the algorithmic timeline periodically.

But it would keep resetting to the algo Timeline until recently.

My problem is that when I select that, I see a completely different feed, regardless of post times. In the algorithmically sorted mode I see tweets that I'll never see in the chronological mode.

Twitter does in fact still reset it all the time, at least on my account. I'll notice it when I run into a bunch of those recommended tweets/follows, which don't appear in the chronological feed. edit but it has been much better recently than it was when the new UI was first released.

I've never seen the algorithmic one in the first place. Probably because I have an old enough account?

Unlikely. I've been a regular user since 2006 and both on the web and the apps, the algo timeline has been there for a long time but I never use it.

I mean it's there, as in, there's a button to switch to it, but I don't think I've ever had it switch automatically.

The one thing that is mighty annoying though, is how it keeps pushing "recommendations" on you. The "someone liked", "someone follows someone", this kind of stuff. If only there was a dedicated button to make someone else's tweet appear in your followers' timelines... I somehow managed to break that misfeature by muting a bunch of "words" that are apparently contained somewhere in the recommendation objects because apparently the mute feature checks not only against the text of the tweet but against some kind of serialized form of it. So I no longer have these neither on the web nor in the Android app.

In my experience, those "recommendations" only appear in the algorithmic feed. Are you sure you haven't been using it unknowingly?

You can also use Tweetdeck.

This applies to your feed but not to replies in a thread.

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