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Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

I'm not opposed to social media feeds having complex recommendation algorithms. I just wish they allowed you to opt in to a reverse chronological feed of only people you follow, like RSS.

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Twitter has this now. The home page is split into two tabs: "For you", the algorithmic feed, and "Following", the reverse chronological feed of just who you follow.

It always had it.

Edit: Why am I downvoted? It literally did, it even was named as you'd expect it ("sort by latest" or something), tho the location was less obvious as it was under the stars icon above the feed.

On my “following” tab (on the phone app) , I’m still getting recommendations for bomb throwers I don’t follow. Am I weird? It’s like an unhinged relative. Not pleasant.

Edit: I reversed “for you” and “following” in my original reply.

I sometimes get these as push notifications with my username added to them.

I find these notifications so confusing - at first glance they look like DMs or mentions to me. I don't follow these people, nor were they RT by anybody I know.

Probably lots of engagement due to that confusion though.

Twitter has always had "chronological timeline" behind a confusing "sparkle" button (except for a brief period a few months back where they removed it, or always defaulted to back to algo timeline? and then restored it a week later)

They called it "Latest Tweets" https://web.archive.org/web/20200205092104/https://help.twit...

immediately getting rid of the sparkle button is one of the few reasons i still have a small amount of faith in elon’s vision of twitter

- Open sourcing this

- Lists as tabs

- _Heavily_ reduced spam

- Can look at Twitter without logging in

I'm likely missing some other obvious/uncontroversially good changes.

I still use Twitter and plan to continue using it. I am satisfied with most of his changes.

Not having to login to Twitter is a great feature. I don't have a Twitter account, but often see posts linked elsewhere, and hated getting hit to login each time.

The spam comment is interesting. I had a sharp uptick in the number of spam messages after the acquisition.

My daily DM spam hit a peak last year than dropped in recent months.

> - Lists as tabs

Twitter added this in 2019

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20880372/twitter-lists-al...

> - Can look at Twitter without logging in

All the recent change was show non-logged in users the Explore view which is... better than the previously mostly nothing I guess.

Again, you've always been able to view tweets and browse profiles if linked to directly before Elon.

There's not any less spam. How could there be when he laid off all the antispam people?

If you expand "see more tweets" sometimes there's normal tweets hiding down there and sometimes it's a bot trying to sell you guns.

How? By having different requirements and implementing another solution? Look at the guy behind YouTube purge tool. One guy accomplished more than YouTube have done for years. Why? No one knows but it's definitely not because lack of resources. I've definitely seen less spam during the last months.

Sure seen a lot more racists since he unbanned all of them to increase engagement numbers!

(YouTube completely changed their comments algorithms in the last few years and it's much better now, so you probably just didn't notice that.)

No, he's talking about the very recent spam explosion in the YT comments, and how a dude manged to build an actual counter to that when YT hasn't really done anything on that front. I guess spam decreased since the peak of 3 months ago, but it's still a massive problem. And again, this is in the past few months, and has nothing to do with the improvements to the yt comment algo changes of the past few years.

Probably just less people board the sinking ship.

- The site often breaking as there is no one left to put out a fire - basically microtransactions that will soon boost your posts

- _Heavily_ reduced spam

You mean increased...

That wasn't the same, clicking the sparkle button still included a lot of recommended tweets. The only effect was that it made the timeline chronological and included all tweets from people you follow.

It would randomly revert back. I like the new layout because sometimes i like a quick peek at the recommendations

It doesn't always stay on whatever you last used, though. I mostly use Following but it always inevitably ends up back on "For you".

Is really "Following" the entire chronological feed? I feel I miss tweets from people I follow that actually appears in the "For You" tab.

It's not. I follow a fairly small # of people (~500) and getting people to reliably show up in is a long-running problem. Following is not enough, you have to favorite or somehow interact with them sufficiently to be sure of seeing all their tweets. It's quite annoying.

Are you sure? I didn't notice something like this.

Very sure. I started noticing the issue a couple of years ago (well before Musk's arrival) because I'd find myself thinking 'I haven't seen anything from ____ in a while, I should follow that person', only to discover that I was already following them and their tweets were just not showing up. New follows will generally pop up reliably, but if someone has fallen out of your regular feed you have to work to put them back into it.

Just now (as I am writing this comment) went to check on someone I saw an interview with the other day, and sure enough I am still following the person and they have been tweeting a few times a day, but I haven't been seeing any of it.

Other weird things are Twitter's habit of just preemptively muting people (I'll sometimes wonder why a person didn't reply and go back to reread a conversation, only to discover that they did reply; and conversely, people that I have muted or blocked showing up in my search results for a trending topic. Most of the people I manually mute are 'influencers' who use software, staff, or pure obsession to get in the first reply to politicians and the like, a behavior I find insufferably annoying even if I agree with their position.

I'm very interested in politics, but almost all my mutes/blocks are people of somewhat-similar political persuasion that Twitter assumes I would want to see, and insists on showing me despite my best efforts. I want to keep tabs on the arguments of people I strenuously disagree with, because I already know my own opinions and don't need validation. It's easier in some respects to maintain a second account with an uber-conservative persona and let the recommendation engine just feed it with more of the same.

That was the great thing with the 3rd party client, I could trust that all the people I followed I would get their actual tweets. Every single one of them. There was no also messing with it, no tweet "liked" by someone else, etc. Who I followed is what I saw, nothing less, nothing more.

Of course Elon banned those apps, so now I am on Mastodon where I see 100% of the content that I want. Bonus is that I can even follow many twitter users, through Mastodon bot mirrors. And of course, no ads.

It seems the only reason why people wouldn't show up then is that they got shadow banned or at least have some deboosting applied. So the algorithm thinks they are spam?

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