Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem

techcrunch.com

50 pointsaelaguiz44 comments

Automated filtering approaches like Facebook's edgerank are a band-aid fix for fundamentally wrong user interface. For me, there is no content on the internet that is time-critical and has to be consumed in the order it was posted, or as soon as it was posted.

The great thing about the Google Reader interface was that you can sign up to 300 blogs, and see which ones have new posts in the left hand column. You read the interesting ones every few days, and perhaps scroll through the headlines of the boring ones once per month.

This way no post goes missing because it is too old, a frequent poster doesn't take priority over an infrequent but more interesting one, and the user decides how to "filter" content based on every visit.

With respect, Google Reader was used by a tiny fraction of the internet population, despite being operated by the biggest online brand for 8 years. The majority of people opted to get their news from sites and services which used some combination of human and computer powered filtering.

I agree the Google Reader model is fantastic for information junkies (in a good way :) with relatively advanced technical skills; but empirically, it didn't work for the mass market Twitter is going after.

So I don't see Edgerank as a band-aid fix, but a fundamental requirement for a large-scale system like this. Because (a) on the demand side, recommendations are what people actually want - let computers do what they're good at and reduce the human tedium of sifting through inane FourSquare checkins etc; (b) on the supply side, relevant native ads inside a recommendations stream are the business model.

For these reasons, I disagree with OP when he says "Twitter should not abandon its unfiltered feed". I know it will cause shock, shock, when they do it, but they will do it because it's so fundamental to their objectives as a mainstream consumer service.

I agree with you, but I think there is at least three related usability issues that made Google Reader less attractive to users. Namely, Google Reader required multiple tools to use efficiently. It also required users to have a basic understanding of RSS feeds. Finally, users had to cope with multiple information formats -- possibly hundreds.

Here's just one example. Recently, a popular web comic changed its feed to contain thumbnails, links and ads -- requiring the user to click through in order to see the comic. Previously it just syndicated large, readable versions of the comic.

That makes a lot of sense to me, but I have to wonder if a less experienced user might feel that something broke. This leads me to consider how it must feel for a "regular user" might feel or react while browsing between feeds and coping with information provided in so many different formats. Some feeds have pictures, some don't, some have complete articles, others just send out links and ads. Maybe I'm giving myself a false memory, but I can remember a feeling of cognitive friction while switching between feeds. I'm an information junkie and I'm technologically literate, so I dealt with it.

I'm saying RSS would possibly fair better if the presentation format were standardized across sites. Maybe a simple style manual would unite enough content providers around a single format?

The problem is actually worse with the popular content providers. They each seem to redefine the layout of an RSS feed, whereas the long tail of bloggers seem to coalesce around a very basic format.

Yes, you have a good point about consistency. That's one of several reasons the siloed equivalents of RSS (Twitter, Facebook, etc) "won". There's a consistent appearance, consistent metadata, and consistent interactions when it comes to liking and commenting; that kind of interaction was never standardised with RSS, despite some basic attempts. The best you could do was "star it on Google Reader" as a de facto standard.

This is really orthogonal to the question of stream filtering, I maintain that's still an issue for RSS aggregators even though as you point out, there are other usability concerns too.

> So I don't see Edgerank as a band-aid fix, but a fundamental requirement for a large-scale system like this. Because (a) on the demand side, recommendations are what people actually want - let computers do what they're good at and reduce the human tedium of sifting through inane FourSquare checkins etc

I can't speak for everyone, but I believe the Google Reader model would work for most people. The interface is entirely based on the source, not the post content, the keywords, or an algorithmically derived importance.

There is nothing technical about it: you notice who posts interesting content and who does not. There is no need for automatically ranking the importance of two posts from separate sources, people are very good at deciding who they find interesting.

Edgerank or proposed twitter feeds of the future are based on the idea of algorithmically figuring out what is the most important news for you right now. But if you don't care about learning about the "news" two weeks later, then a source-based manual filtering would let the user do that far better than a ML algorithm can. And if it's out of date in two weeks, it wasn't worth reading at all.

Yeah, my first introduction to Twitter was frustrating because I was trying to use it like a feed... Twitter is not a substitute for feeds. The total lack of "weight" given to things that you have a high-interest in vs. things you have a low-interest in (but have an incredibly high postcount) made that kind of usage frustrating for me.

Twitter is a good platform in some ways - it's simple, sensible and effective. But it scratches a very particular itch and seems to fail both as an RSS-like platform (I want to read everything that comes out from sources X, Y, and Z) and as a "what's exciting right now" platform such as Reddit where the best of the best bubbles to the top.

This is what twitter lists were created for, and the reason why twitter has Tweetdeck for advanced users. You do the filtering however you like and create columns based on your interests. It's not as optimal as Reader's approach, but still very good in its own respect.

I do wonder, if Twitter hadn't gone psycho on the twitter clients, if this problem would have been solved. Twitter stopped most development on this issue for anyone outside Twitter.

Tweetdeck best solved this issue for me on my phone. The widget felt just right as it allowed me to divide my feed up into 4 or 5 useful columns and I was able to periodically check in at what seemed like the right rate. I really felt I was up-to-speed with stuff that interested me.

After Twitter finally killed the Tweetdeck mobile client earlier this year, I moved on to the official Twitter client. But now I've got something like the problem described in the article. I can't seem to get my Twitter feed where I want it and I'm gradually losing interest. @GreatDismal has become my de-facto curator for Twitter and I've gone back to just using bookmarks for sites like HN and Reddit to keep up with what's trending.

i wonder, too, if their whole control-freak attitude has alienated the people who were most invested in discussing and helping with this sort of meta-issue just out of a "twitter is the new commons" feeling.

i have no real idea whether it is or isn't essential to their business model to be able to control every aspect of how you view your stream, but personally i stopped caring about them the minute they did that. i still use twitter, but if they vanished overnight i wouldn't really feel any sense of loss, whereas when there was a thriving ecosystem of people building things atop the firehose i did feel like i was part of something that played a significant role in today's internet.

I was working on a Twitter client that did something very much like this (partitioning people into different streams, etc.), but once I saw the way the wind was blowing (in terms of how Twitter didn't want third-party developers), I now only run it on my machine for my own use.

Twitter flipped their decision on IFTTT. I wonder if they will reconsider their stance on twitter clients as well.

The spproach may still work. Apple's walled garden has contributed to what many consider a good UE.

Having control of the UE is important.

However, I believe that Twitter could have managed the developer angst better. There was warning though.

I can still write innovative apps for Apple's various OSes, but I cannot write an innovative Twitter client. They closed that door.

I think Twitter would have been better off just telling all the client writers that it was a requirement to show the "ad tweets" in the stream and call it a day. They are not Apple .

The problem was solved. By Summify. Then twitter bought them and that was the end of that.

This is a huge problem, IMO. It only takes one or two noisy accounts to flood your feed on a regular basis. There are a handful of people I really don't want to unfollow, but they tend to dominate my feed even when they're not completely overwhelming it.

All I really want is the ability to designate certain follows as "important", which would give me their tweets in something like the format of an RSS reader at the top of the page. Then dump the rest into the current "river of news" style which I can wade through, or not.

It's always confused me to that I can't prioritize tweeters into 1, 2 and 3. Open up twitter after 8 hours and the tweets are sorted in priority.

Because this feature would be abused by everyone who thinks too highly of their own posts.

How would that work? I mean I would follow a new person and categorize them into 1, 2 or 3 preference.

I stopped following the president because his feed would crowd everything else out. Same with CNN or the NYT. I just don't want them to crowd out the Bret Victors on my feed.

I use lists to separate different groups of people

lists are useless imo, they are just like contact lists in skype or aim chat. And to make them there is no reward after. Lists would be useful to organize people and give different rules to have posts leak into main feed. for example posts with at least 2 retweets and/or 2 likes. if they'd make something like that, that would be awesome.

For now I just don't bother I scan fast enought to find interesting bits for me.

my 2c.

Have you tried seperating your lists into different columns in Tweetdeck? That seems to be what they were made for.

yeah that's how i use them

I've always wondered how people who follow thousands of people are able to get much value from their timelines. I've concluded that they don't, or they are using lists or other tools to manage their Twitter experience.

Speaking of lists, I disagree with the author's claim that they are hard to set up. Twitter (and many Twitter apps) have made a list quite easy to set up, and monitor. Doing this is one way to handle the unfiltered feed problem.

He brings up an interesting point, though, regarding negative behaviors such as being less likely to follow new people. I agree that this can happen, but the flip side is people may be far more selective about who they follow as time goes on. Assuming that such users are regularly unfollowing bad or spammy accounts, their Twitter experience should improve over time.

"I've always wondered how people who follow thousands of people are able to get much value from their timelines."

Simple: TweetDeck. I can see it now on my 2nd screen, with 32 columns allowing me to, yes, effectively follow thousands of accounts and topics using lists and filters.

Acquiring and growing TweetDeck is really the best thing Twitter's done, from a purely selfish experience, as it's become a fantastic research/communication tool.

It's obviously low priority for them, evidenced by shutting down the mobile clients, but it seems they are smart enough to keep it running to keep a percentage of power users active in the network.

Every new version of the android twitter app makes it harder to get at the lists (currently, from launching the app it takes going through 3 levels of menu to get to my main list). It's a feature that Twitter itself clearly wants to bury but can't be bothered to just kill.

One phenomenon which Facebook takes into account which Twitter does not is that of the loquacious acquaintance, possibly someone with a business constantly hyping things, possibly someone who just likes to hear themselves speak more often than I do. They apply slight pressure to me to follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook so I do so.

On Facebook I can easily set people to three settings which are private to me - read everything they write, read only significant things they write (things which get more than ordinary likes/replies, or whatever), or ignore them. This is great for me, otherwise my entire Facebook feed would be filled with my 4-5 chattiest friends or current/former coworkers, I'd have to scroll through their collective 10-12 posts a day to see anyone elses, etc.

Twitter does not have this option where I publicly follow someone, due to them pressuring me to follow them on Twitter, but where I can actually privately ignore them. Which just tends to mean I use Twitter less. Maybe there is an option buried somewhere where I can do this, but it's definitely not obvious like on Facebook. Which just means I use Twitter a lot less. Because all it is for me is a constant stream of 4-5 chatty acquaintances with the dozens of others I follow popping in once in a while.

There are ways to deal with this on Twitter, but none of them are that good. I can create another account, but then there are problems from that - accounts with private tweets I no longer have access to or have to ask for two adds from everyone etc. I can create a private list without these people on it, but then I have to go to the trouble of maintaining two lists - the main list and the private list. Facebook just makes this a lot easier.

I have one list (top 80 or so) and the firehose (thousands). The list is for the people who I don't really want to miss, and the firehose is for dipping into now and then. Excessive verbosity belongs in the firehose.

I occasionally promote and demote, and as a private list nobody is the wiser. I assume others do this too.

If you like this article's ideas, are fascinated by social graphs and smoothing communication among nodes, enjoy functional programming (functional Scala, Clojure, etc), and are interested in a new job, drop me an email.

Have you posted on the "Who's hiring" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475879) thread?

Haven't, but will, thanks. This was extremely topical, so thought I'd mention here where there were likely to be interested people.

The OP is trying to solve a problem with a FB mentality. Twitter is a different animal. Lists solve many problems. Twitter could do a better job surfacing lists and making them easier to implement and return to, but we the users have a responsibility too I believe. We often complain about spammy accounts or unmanageable TLs when we control the Follow button.

There should be a distinction between friends and followers. I'd friend many more people, but I don't give a shit about most friend's tweets. (Most of them are about their current dinner, or something equally unimportant.) I think I currently follow around 15 people, and that's exactly right for how often I check my feed and how much time I want to spend on twitter.

So for me this works is fine, but I know many others that follow for social reasons, not because the person they start following is interesting. And if you do that, yes indeed your timeline will be overflowing all the time.

I've never not followed anyone for having too many tweets in my timeline already. And if someone starts spamming shit I don't care about (accounts with lots of followers sometimes abuse it for political or other things), I unfollow them without second thought. And I let them know why I unfollowed (like with downvotes here and on stackoverflow, I always try to comment if I do negative actions).

I've wanted a twitter client similar to the old aim clients with respect to away messages.

Just a list of people I follow and their most recent tweet. Either ordered alphabetically or ordered by date last tweeted. If I hover over one of the people , then I can look at their past X tweets.

The author's suggestion here to fix this problem is to have twitter offer feed cleaning tools and un-follow recommendations. Not only will this never happen, but it could create far too many false positives to even be a good thing.

I think the only way out of this is for twitter to put out 1 or a series of lenses with which to view your feed. People still want to follow all of their friends as well as celebrities, athletes, bands, news aggregators, etc; however, they don't need to see all of that crap in one feed. I think it'll be the redditization of twitter that solves this problem.

Personally I don't think Twitter cares much about the quality of users' timeline.

Twitter doesn't provide any easy way to manage followings while keep suggesting people to follow, because promoted accounts will be unfollowed easily.

I am one of the user in the official popular users list in China region, but most of my tweets are Japanese. This kind of careless mistake should not happen if they had do a simple review before selecting me. I've ask them to remove me from the list, but they never reply.

They seems to encourage users to keep following, increase the quantity not quality.

I am a pretty heavy Facebook user and can't see the slightest use in Twitter. Or rather, it seems like an actively awful thing.

Facebook already allows and even encourages short posts. Forcing them seems like recipe to produce horrid dreck and that does seem just like what Twitter does.

I write an article before about this issue that we have with most of the social networks: https://medium.com/editors-picks/b5eaaa3ff7c3

This problem is addressed by tools like http://www.qureet.com/

Disclaimer: I've met the guy who runs this, but haven't yet got round to trying it out.

Is there potential for a third party app doing it (the fixes mentioned in the article) instead?

The second sentence of this article is false. When the lede contains blatant errors, that's your signal, as a reader, to stop reading.

Because I had to go back: "Everything you tweet shows up to every one of your followers"

everything goes through FB goggles with this author

Reply on news.ycombinator.com