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Comment by schipplock | Hacker News Reader

   I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline!

I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithmic timeline "easier" to consume, I don't have to invest time to find the perfect user to follow, I don't have to fiddle with lists etc..., just open Twitter and consume).

(btw.: I'm not using Twitter (also not using Arch scnr))

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I constantly switch Twitter back to chronological and immediately notice when it pushes me onto the algo timeline.

Another recent change they made (I think just before Elon took over) was making Notifications algorithmic. As a somewhat low-notification user, it's essentially ruined notifications for me - most of the ones I get are nonsense now instead of signals someone has interacted with me.

I think the only site I use where algos actually add value is YouTube, after many years of sending people down weird/wrong paths their algos actually seem pretty solid now in terms of suggesting content relevant to me.

After Youtube stopped displaying the number of downvotes for a video, algos is the only thing left that you can rely upon to understand if the video is good. But I'd prefer being able to rely on downvotes number.

I haven’t been pushed to algorithmic timeline in months. I think they are just sticky user choices now.

You just discovered that happy people aren’t complaining on social media. 99% of people can be perfectly happy with something that’s constantly dumped upon.

You see this with chain restaurant reviews. A great one can have endless bad reviews on Google, Yelp, etc because by and large only people who had trouble bother to review.

But sometimes the reviews are accurate. Sometimes the critics and audience concur on a movie. Sometimes the people yelling on Twitter really are in the fire they're yelling about.

I must've set it up wrong. My Twitter home page is filled with posts that I don't care from people I don't watch, Twitter repeatedly recycles and then pushes those content to me because it thinks I'll be interested. How arrogant.

In my case, Twitter already has an algorithmic timeline.

Now I read my daily news update from few subscribed newsletters, websites as well as r/worldnews. These are far better sources of information than Twitter.

Don't get me wrong, other platforms that I enjoy such as YouTube and Reddit also has algorithmic timeline, but I've never seen such bad implementation before straight to the level of annoying and begging for uninstall.

It sounds like you'd be better off with the chronological view or just following more accounts.

I never disliked the algorithmic timeline, I just disliked the fact Twitter did everything it could to get you use it, including switching back to it after a while without telling you. The second I notice a platform not only being manipulative, but thinking I'm stupid and wouldn't notice, I start to resent it.

stated vs revealed preference. many people say they want chron, but actually end up using algo a lot more (figures)

When you say "figures", do you mean that's what the evidence shows? If so, presumably twitter's automatic switching from chrono to algo is a significant factor.

I think OP meant “it figures,” as in “that’s not surprising.” But regarding figures as in statistics and usage, I have only anecdata but it seems Twitter recently is respecting the user selection for a longer period.

I've also noticed the longer period, but I assumed that was based on me having manually selected it so many times rather than being a global setting.

Algorithmic makes no sense to me. Imagine being in a group chat with friends where an algorithm decides which messages you can see and the way the messages are sorted. It would be absolute nonsense.

I think that it is case of preference or just different use case. If you follow few people that tweet sparsly, you want chronological. If you follow many people who tweet a lot, you want algoritmus.

That just sounds like algorithmic with extra steps. An algorithm can take information about your follows tweeting patterns and adjust the amount of chronological timeline you see.

Chronological means it is chronological no matter what. As in, you as a user decided that this is what you get no matter what algorithm thinks.

That is much different then algorithm that sometimes shows chronological.

The availability of the chronological timeline is what's kept me on Twitter; hate the algorithmic. If they ever do away with the chronological, I'm gone.

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