Tweetbot if you’re on iOS. I’ve used it for probably close to a decade and nothing compares IMO. Always chronological timeline, no ads whatsoever, filters, mutes, etc. It’s just great. They recently moved to a subscription model (I know, I know) but it’s only like $5/year and way worth it. In the past, major versions were usually a $10-$20 upgrade price. Ever since they moved to this model the rate of updates and new features has really ramped up, too.
Yep, that’s what I’ve been using since the day I joined Twitter. I literally never use the site except to sign up and adjust account settings (like 2FA).
Harpy on Android is pretty solid. Nice UI and loads fast. I seem to have some issues viewing threads when navigating to them from a retweet but I may just be missing something.
I deeply hate the algorithmic (Home) version. It seems to totally hide the tweets of people who don't have a certain ranking. What's the point of following someone's account if Tweeter doesn't even show me what they are posting?
I only read Twitter through Tweetbot on my phone and have been doing so for like forever. I get a reversed chronological timeline, no ads and no recommendations. I hear people talk about how useless Twitter has become, but for me Twitter has been more or less the same since 2006.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
They should have a separate tab for the two of them like YouTube has, I like being able to move quickly between the algorithmic recommended feed and the “subscribed to” one.
Part of the reason twitter is so great is that reading posts chronologically gives you a feeling of connection and immediacy in communication. I like reading posts from 5 seconds ago, conversations only yet halfway through, absolute bleeding edge breaking news, it's unique among social media platforms in this regard and that makes it feel very alive. But I don't get that from the algorithm, my timeline turns into more of a constantly rotating greatest hits reel of posts in my corner of the network graph. That's cool, ha ha very funny meme. But it doesn't feel "alive" then, it feels like FB/IG/Tiktok. Which kind of ruins the point of why I enjoy twitter in the first place.
They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline for ... well, forever.
As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline.
But I can't fathom why seemingly no effort has gone into monetizing a chronological timeline. Why is it's foregone conclusion that it won't work with advertising the way the algorithmic was works?
I don't think there's any issue monetizing a chronological timeline.
The issue for them I imagine is retention: with chronological, it's likely that when you visit Twitter the first few messages you see are not interesting and you leave. But if they put a tweet that's popular among your social group in front of you? Odds are that's interesting to you and you stick around a bit longer.
I dislike that, to be clear, but I imagine this is the human behavior for >90% of people.
That's pretty much the thinking behind layouts of malls and grocery stores.
Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating.
Malls try to balance enabling people to find what they are looking for, but also make sure they don't find it too easily so that people can wonder about and be exposed to as many stores as possible.
If you enter the Dubai Mall from the metro, there's a big sign that points to the left and says "Food Court". You'd get to the food court much faster if you turn right.
There's a reason why refrigerated items are usually at the back: fridges usually face a wall. You can have a shelf at the back sometimes but that's not always possible
Also, for those quick purchases you can always go to somewhere closer, a gas station, etc.
In fact in Europe some places do have the quick purchases right in front of the store so you don't need to go around (Tesco as an example).
Nah, I saw this on my last shopping trip to a mega grocery. Bought basically all the items on my list on the right side of the store (produce, other food stuffs) and then had to walk past a half dozen aisles filled with random crap (non food) to get eggs from the dairy section.
The dairy section is the most infuriatingly obscure section in Swedish stores. To the point that I've seen it hidden away in a small subsection only accessible by a rather narrow entrance.
I went the other day just to look at a dining table. It was only in the 3rd or 4th showroom. Of course, to get out I had to wander through the majority of like 13 or 14 other showrooms because you pretty much can only take the linear path to get to an exit.
Besides the shortcuts mentioned by the sibling comment, you can also just go from the exit (yes, you can enter through the exit), straight to the warehouse.
You need to know the name of what you're looking for and then use their kiosks to find where the thing is in the warehouse and just pick it up directly.
This trick turns 1 hour trips through Ikea into 5 minute trips.
Didn't work for my usecase there. I specifically went to check out a table in person. Not necessarily buy it. It was only on display in a showroom, not the warehouse section.
Yeah, that sometimes happens. I don't really understand why they don't have all their products in the warehouse. Plus they don't deliver some stuff, despite the fact that they deliver almost everything. It's quite confusing.
Funny you mention the delivery thing. When I was in the store, I checked the website for a couple of tables. According to the site neither were deliverable to me (in a major city, FWIW).
So I went up to a couple salespeople and asked why. They couldn't say why, just that they did have it in stock at this warehouse and they themselves could ship it for X fee.
I don't really get it. They said maybe they were out of stock at the factory or online order fulfillment center. But the pages said they were available.
I'd imagine anyone concerned about efficiancy at Ikea would just order online.
The value proposition of the long Ikea walks is the set up rooms showing how the products look in use, allowing you to visualise before you buy. I take a friend and a coffee and take my time at Ikea.
> Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating.
Wonder if the covid-catalyzed uptake on grocery pickup options will change this in any way. I certainly discovered the joys of making grocery errands much more efficient, to the point where the decided majority of my store runs are pickup-only: I don't waste time navigating the store.
(And hey, the store can show me random products based off ML analysis of my purchase history, win-win.)
Obviously they can't analyze your purchase history in-store, but I do like how sometimes grocery stores put commonly bought items together. For example the supermarket I often go to has marshmallows, Hershey's chocolate, and graham crackers together. They also keep cans of beans (and perhaps other stuff that goes in chili? I can't remember) by the ground beef.
> They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating.
I dont know if this is really happening. Grocery stores where I go are fairly static. They change layout once in years and larger one have big signs that tell you where what roughly is.
Hotels don’t make money if you stay in the room, it actually costs them money in terms of electricity. But they do want you to spend money so they might indeed do things such as banning outside food deliveries or making the basin un-pluggable so that you can’t do your own laundry.
There was a case a few years ago where a Marriott got fined for blocking outside wifi.
>Hotels don’t make money if you stay in the room, it actually costs them money in terms of electricity.
No, them renting the room to you - when you'll usually be out of it most of the day - is absolutely how they make money. Maybe in Las Vegas the room rate is a loss leader but your average business hotel is 100% making their profit on the room.
That's my kind of hotel, just a business that makes their money on exactly what the fuck it looks like they're making the money on.
I once stayed at a place that had super, super cheap refreshment rates on the mini-fridge. Cheaper if you got them at a store obviously, but not punishing like most other hotels, less than double the supermarket rate. Guess what? I made them tons of money, it was super convenient, I didn't go out of my way to avoid them.
What I mean is the hotel doesn’t make more money if you stay inside the room, which was GP’s premise that they would want to entice guests into spending more hours in the room. They would prefer that guests leave the room and go to the bar or restaurant for instance.
This is funny but on a side note, isn't this exactly what some casinos and some malls/stores do? I once spent one hour in a duty free mall because it was like a maze and I couldn't find the exit.
With reverse chronological timeline, it's harder to build a advertising profile.
While it's important to know what tweets a user is interacting with, the personalization option can surface more things as "You might like", "You follow x, and he liked", "Interesting tweet on the topics you follow/might like" and so on. Whether or not you choose to interact with anyone or more of those is a signal, and helps with advertising (if advertising is a question of "What tweet/content you are likely to interact with?"). Other than brands, most twitter influencers, or would-be influencers end up spending money on twitter ads to gain followers.
With a reverse chronological timeline, it's hard to surface those tweets from outside the network without a jarring experience. They also realize the power of defaults and hence they decided to take away the default option.
As a side-note: a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is when they start conflating liking and sharing by implementing the "You follow x, and he liked" feature that you described. Since this clearly violates the user's intention (if you wanted to share something, you would have shared it), this serves as a subtle but distinct signal that manipulating users has become more important than listening to them.
Phase 2: profit (through using and abusing their users).
Both steps are written in stone in their business plan on day 1, you just don't know it.
As a user you were still in phase 1.
Similar story with image hosting websites. First they don't have ads and load fast and don't really have image restrictions. Then they start adding restrictions and ads.
Profit doesn't have to be equivalent to abuse. The idea that you have to abuse your users to make a profit is a relatively new one pioneered by Silicon Valley scum thanks to anti-competitive practices and lax/non-existent regulation.
Before this, we had centuries of businesses who were sustainable by just charging a fair premium on the goods they sold to their customers, and both sides were happy enough with the transaction to continue.
The phone company? You pay them a fee for access and that's it - they have no incentive to prioritize certain callers over others for "engagement"'s sake.
Why not? My point is that a communications network doesn't have to be hostile. It is possible to run a communications platform and get people to pay for it.
i'd argue social networks only become evil if the want to grow revenue and earnings and more importantly keep growing them at some fixed rate y/y for too long (otherwise they get recategorized as value instead of growth and all the juicy multiples disappear from their stock grants...)
Or federated like the Fediverse applications, i.e. Mastodon. It's much harder to squeeze users because they can leave you without loosing their social network.
I agree that's a possible reason. But I don't think it's specifically necessary for Twitter, especially the sort of power user who wants a chronological timeline.
Whether or not they show topic data for a particular tweet, they generally have it. I only use the chronological timeline, and I cleared out the interests list a year or two back, but they have built up a profile of hundreds of interests for me.
I suspect forcing the ranked timeline on people is all about a small portion of Twitter juicing their engagement metrics, with no grand cross-team strategy in play.
It's also because there's power in being able to influence when people see something. It's harder to spot when that occurs when your timeline isn't chronological.
Which is what pissed me off the most about TikTok for the brief period I used it.
They would just show me random shit basically irregardless of date.. and that's not at all what I wanted. I found it to be an new source- of sorts. I'm not saying a good one, but at least it was somewhat interesting to may see peoples perspective on some topic. But what I found is it would just show me stuff that could be months old, days old etc instead of prioritizing like.. top day things.
I haven't used it during the russia/ukraine time.. but I can't imagine how wildly inaccurate of a picture you would get if you are viewing stuff completely out of date order. Yeah they put the date on the video.. but that doesn't really help, everything is still all over the place.
For all Reddit's faults- I can at least go there, take a look at some of the top headlines in some subreddits.. and know if I see something it's recent unless I am looking otherwise.
With chronological timelines you either "run out" of content (because you've already refreshed like 15 times this hour and read everything the people you follow have said), or you get buried in content you don't want (because you're following people for hairdressing tips and they're all tweeting 20-page threads about why Putin is actually in the right somehow). Eventually you burn out and churn out.
With algorithmic timelines the system is deliberately optimizing for "what keeps you on the site", even if it's not new or not something you follow. Hence, you stay on longer and view more ads. There's nothing about chrono that makes advertising less effective; algorithmic timelines just keep people on site and thus keep them as part of your ad inventory.
I think seeing everything from people you know and seeing things in chronological order are separate. Just because you select the latter doesn't mean you get the former.
Simple experiment:
Go to Facebook and use
?sk=h_chr
scroll until you "run out" of material, and then check to see if you actually saw all of the recent stuff from a particular friend.
That is, not my experience with algorithmic at all...
Algorithmic digs up days old posts I saw, commented and liked and slaps them at the front.. the new stuff, the stuff I'd want to see and interact with, just disappears.
But then maybe that's my fault for curating my timeline to show creators and not influencers/talking heads...
That's the point - algorithmic artificially lengthens the time you need to actually see new posts by making you scroll through lots of old bullshit - and you guessed it - ads in between and never giving you a clear indicator of when you've all caught up. By contrast, chronological will by default give you the latest stuff (which in case of news is what you want, and might even remove the need for you to see earlier stuff) and makes it super clear to tell when you've reached the end of the new stuff.
> They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline
Or the simpler explanation is that the chronological timeline isn't actually the preferred setting, outside of a small but vocal minority.
If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all? I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate. If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature.
> As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline.
I don't follow this logic. There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.
> If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all?
If I recall correctly, this was the default. Then they introduced the semi curated algorithmic as a feature. Then replaced chronological and got a ton of backlash. They've been playing a game of capitulation and direction ever since.
> There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.
The chronological timeline is your connected accounts + ads. The algorithmic timeline is the same but also some "suggestions." Ostensibly this makes it harder to immediately separate ad from, say, an account your friend follows.
You've mentioned it a couple times - their analytics may support that fewer users are using the chronological sort. I wonder if it's because they are frustrated and moving off to alternative viewing portals to get the feed experience they like.
>Or the simpler explanation is that the chronological timeline isn't actually the preferred setting, outside of a small but vocal minority.
you can justify a lot of things with "the silent majority doesn't mind it". the silent majority is tech-illiterate, and there are a lot of things they are indifferent to. if it wasn't for the loud minority, we'd be advancing into the dystopian future at much faster pace.
>I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate.
the overwhelming majority will always use whichever option is the default
>If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature.
that will eventually happen, and when it does, I'm sure I'll read about how that is a good thing
If the feed is strictly chronological, then the user has a better chance of knowing when they've seen everything, and won't come back to the content until more time has passed.
With the algorithmic feed, you could refresh the page at any time and get a different personalized set of posts that make it feel like your feed is more active than it actually is.
I agree, I think Twitter’s argument that the Home feed is actually more interesting for most people is accurate.
I myself tend to stick on Home. However, there are times when I want to be on Latest, particularly if there’s an event on or developments are happening at a rapid pace.
The old UI seemed ideal to me. It gave people the choice to choose what their default was. Now, they’ve taken that away… to what end? Force pushing people over to Home who expressly don’t want it probably isn’t going to work.
Companies need to service the vocal minority. This isn't a factory at Ford, they are more than capable and resourced enough to deliver colors other than black.
> But I can't fathom why seemingly no effort has gone into monetizing a chronological timeline. Why is it's foregone conclusion that it won't work with advertising the way the algorithmic was works?
Operant conditioning and intermittent reinforcement are why.
A chronological timeline has benefits but will look very dull compared to a timeline where Twitter can put in front of you stuff that's related to recent news but that was posted a while ago. The key is to push topics in front of you, not the latest thing that was said.
The question is: who chooses the topic?
In Google, the default results of the search engine can be circumvented by adding keywords to force the search algorithm to follow your thoughts.
In Twitter, well...
You hope Twitter won't be evil.
[Guess what? It eventually will]
I would bet there’s a phenomenon at work here where you can addict almost everybody for a short time by doing X but long term a few become hardcore addicts and most become alienated.
It’s hard to tell that your actions have changed the kind of user who is most engaged until your platform is destroyed and consists of users who barely pay attention and addicts that feed off of each other and not much else (Facebook).
Metrics lie and optimizing for certain performance metrics ends up optimizing for exploiting human weaknesses which is actually somewhat uncommon in the population, which explains the process of optimizing your platform into irrelevance.
Why is it a foregone conclusion that it's about straightforward monetization, or even monetization at all?
What if it's actually a way to hide specific topics or sentiments from the timeline? If the algorithm of what to show first is a black box, scales can be tipped just like Google does with search results.
If it's a pure chronological timeline, you either have to be blatant in not displaying the tweets you want to suppress, or let people see them.
The chronological timeline is an algorithmic timeline. It uses an algorithm, sorting, to display the best content.
What they want to use instead is a different, inferior algorithm (for you, or you wouldn't hate it so much), but which is superior for them. That algorithm is not the only profitable algorithm, it is one of many, your preferred system is also algorithmic. This is just an algorithm that uses a black box nobody understands, or even tries to understand, or even tries to read (which they could, they have access to the weights of the neural net), and consequently, which they can claim to have no responsibility or even power over.
They're actually more heuristics, not algorithms. As such, they have all kinds of failures, many intentional. Algorithms (at least in my book) are generally are air-tight, and verifiable. Like you chronological feed, if two items were out of order, you could see it and it would show the algorithm to be wrong. It would have to lie about the date (which you do see sometimes) to fool you.
These heuristics are really just the man behind the curtain, imposing his will in an algorithmically-amplified way. It is driven by a dual goal of profit and political ambitions, with the latter being weighted more highly.
None of those motivations seem to make much sense. I’d bet on simple negligence: only a tiny minority insists on the chronological timeline and it’s therefore acceptable to annoy them from time to time.
I feel like a smuggler. I closed my Twitter account due to such shenanigans, and now read my favorite tweeters via Nitter RSS feeds. None of the various Twitter bovine excrement comes along for the ride, just the words of the people I intend to follow, in the order posted. No ads, no trending topics, no shocking takes from a friend of a friend of a friend. And for me the read-only nature of this arrangement is a bonus feature.
So it's probably just a matter of time before this route is plugged.
As far as I know, Nitter reverse-engineers and uses the same API that their official web frontend uses. So while it can be made difficult and turned into a game of cat & mouse, it can't be "shut down" per se without also shutting down their own UI.
If you want "Twitter" without ads, algorithmic feed manipulated by marketing, actual moderation, and actual community, I suggest joining a Mastodon[0] instance (and you probably already know people who are on the platform, making it easier to choose which instance ;)). It's kinda like using Twitter in 2007, but with way more features. For example, selective permissions per-"toot" ("followers only", or "unlisted" which makes it not show up on the public timeline, but still visible on your profile or to followers), content warning on toots (like a spoiler warning), full image description support, much longer posts...
Personally I'm closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon. Many in my social circle have already done so.
Oh, while I'm at it: if you want to view Twitter posts without having a Twitter account (or just don't want to see ads and trending crap), check out Nitter[1]. Alternative front-end. It also has minimal JS and is far more resource-efficient (viewing my profile loaded 1.56mb of resources on Nitter, compared to 9.2mb on Twitter)
Last year, I throw some significant amount of time, energy, and dev focus to get into this; on the basis that I _wanted_ Mastodon to be a successful thing. To be specific, I've first spent around 2 weeks for "searching"/browsing (there's no search, only tags :/ ), seeking out acquaintances, and looking for topics/servers that would tickle my curiosity/insight senses.
There were none for me.
So, given that mastodon is large, and federated, surely the problem is with me right? So, I said fuck it, let's break out the API. I wrote a scraper, seeded with a few least-bad people's profile, programmed it to pull the last ~32 toots & add all connections of the user to scrape breadth-first to get a wide array of perspectives. ~150 servers & 50,000 toots. I then took my general keyword list (~150 items, representing majority of my interests in both layman and technical terms) that I use to evaluate social networks, and search engines, and crunched through the toots.
Results: deep technical terms have accidental hits, generally used either in different context; or scratching almost none of the surface.
Wide terms generally pull very low signal, from the general vicinity of conspiracy theories/how bad twitter is/crypto/mastodon is great.
I'd really really would prefer to actually use Mastodon, but
1, the features they offer optimizes against it's own usage (lack of search, lack of discoverability; you can call this positive change, but again, it optimizes against onboarding & finding interesting stuff)
2, because it's federated, there's no-one dedicated to acquiring people who have better use of their time, and
3, the people who are in there, do not, currently, would lead me to level up in directions I care about.
Mastodon represents a set of preferences, and I'm happy for you that it seems to be aligning with yours; it does not aligns with mine, is all I'm saying.
Ooh, thanks for posting this analysis. I'd been hazily feeling like I should check out Mastodon, but only for reasons of theory. Sounds like Metcalfe's Law applies here, though, so you've saved me a bunch of time.
the problem with Nitter is you can see only one user's timeline, I want to see multiple users combined, then I can ditch Twitter site completely just for passive reading, but until then it's still more convenient with one account read multiple accounts in one timeline instead opening them one by one unless I'm missing something and Nitter allows combined timeline from multiple accounts
Mastodon and federation is a very bad solution to the problem at hand and brings its own issues. There are benefits to centralization.
A good solution to this problem (and "growth and engagement" at large) is to make advertising-based business models less profitable (with better and enforced privacy regulation, more liability for the ads they run, or losing Section 230 protection for those who manipulate content's reach to maximize "engagement" as opposed to being a neutral communication platform where the user controls which content is shown to them, etc) so that businesses go back to the old model of the user paying for the service, aligning the incentives of the platform with what the users want.
GoodTwitter2[0] is the only reason that I still use the web version anymore. I can handle the mobile interface on a mobile device, but making the desktop experience mobile-themed was the straw that almost broke the camel's back. GoodTwitter2 mostly fixes that, thankfully.
The userscript also fixes the reverse-chronological issue. There's literally a setting that enables one to force "Latest Tweets First" mode, so it'll switch back to the "latest" feed whenever Twitter has decided that you should be viewing their "home" feed instead.
May I suggest the FF extension Minimal Theme[0] by Thomas Wang, which simplifies the UI by removing those enormous blobs of texts everywhere and also by hiding the "trends" panel.
Very good addition: it can also hide engagement counts (replies, RTs and likes), so you can scroll sanely without feeling obliged to like a stupid tweet just because it has 100 likes already.
Tweak New Twitter [0] can automatically keep you on Latest Tweets and hide the new timeline tabs, even if Latest Tweets is "unpinned" [1] (as long as the implementation hasn't changed significantly since the last A/B test they did of timeline tabs on web)
I can recommend "Tweet New Twitter" too. It allows users fine-grained control of Twitter's features (algorithmic content, retweets, UI changes and more).
The only small criticism that I have is that there is no button or keyboard shortcut to quickly disable it in the case that I actually need one of the disabled features). For that you can quickly bring up Firefox' addons dialog via Ctrl+Shift+A though, to disable the addon completely.
I don’t care what they do so long as they don’t turn off API-access allowing the user to switch to much better alternatives free of their advertising, profiling, and spying crap
I have a bookmark of their mobile web app on my phone’s home screen now. Works great as a replacement if you don’t mind losing features like push notifications and the ability to speak in Spaces! It also has the benefit of tweet drafts syncing from your other web browsers.
I hate Twitter for all the change they've made-more spam and useless engagement features. I noticed this in testing some time ago, constantly making it hard just to see what I want, not the Algo suggested tweets, other peoples likes, spam etc.
Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust.
Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube on every video view, and I can't even speak Chinese.
> Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube
You are lucky! I obviously share IP at home with my children, but how is my 13 years old daughter getting disgusting commercials (all in Portuguese for some reason??) of "Manscape" products, women's "spray everywhere even there" deodorant, some soap where interracial couple does everything other than THAT under the shower... and few others jaw-droppers I honestly forgot by now. And tons and tons of crypto spam. I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore?? has to be some bot fishing for keywords and nude, if none, then approve.
I don’t get it. Your teenager sees advertising for body soaps, hair grooming for men, and an ad has an interracial couple? I cannot see what is remotely disgusting.
I agree, If you have enough followers on Twitter the retweet, like and "similar posters" spam is already so severe that rather than scrolling down a mile to see if someone I follow posted the previous night I end up just visiting their profile from memory.
If this gets any worse I will just in frustration stop using the platform.
You can easily be shadowbanned by Twitter for complaining about Twitter on Twitter.
They send you accounts fake and delayed notices to drive engagement.
Muting words and phrases has not worked for years.
They interact with other apps and track words you type and use them to push content and ads to you, likely even when you have the setting for third party data disabled.
The interest keywords associated with your account cannot be changed, it is a pool of data gathered from people you follow and what you've typed over the life of running you account, it often locks you into an information bubble that dictates everything you see for the life of each account, and it also ensures that each use has a customized (yet individually/uniquely frustrating) experience that can't properly be explained nor replicated by any other user.
They’ve made the decision to lay down the algorithm long ago.
Mind you, I can absolutely see that activity on Twitter has only been going up recently. Which would be great if 80% of it wasn’t self-promotion, crypto babble and spam, plagiarized content, and LinkedIn style “expert” threads.
On top of that, all of the promoted tweets I see are junk content farms.
It hasn’t been an ideal place for connecting with friends for a while, and now it’s becoming an absolute shit hole for decent content or professional communities. What will be left?
You guys really need to get your twitter feed in order. You realize that they have an option to only show latest tweets of people you follow? Then it's just about unfollowing all crypto spammers and you're good. While my feed isn't free of undesired content, it's far better than any other platform I use, including HN (because the good bits from HN get shared on Twitter).
You are commenting on a post that is about Twitter removing the option to see latest tweets by default…
Also, the chronological timeline is not ideal once you follow > 100 profiles. One of the issues at hand here is that they removed the “missed” section and replaced with the algorithmic feed. There is no way to catch up with only the most interesting tweets from people you follow, other than scrolling through all of it.
I guess it depends on how prolific your feed is. I don't have 40 minutes to review the entire timeline every day.
AI is not inherently evil. Yes, I want to see the most relevant / controversial / liked tweets by people I follow. Most of that doesn't need any complex algorithm in the first place.
What I don't want to see are bubble-inducing "recommended" tweets, or tweets liked by someone I follow (isn't that what retweets are for?), or "topics", or "people you should follow". If I wanted an AI-curated feed I'd just go to facebook or read the news.
They might make it harder to choose but props to Twitter for still having the chronological option and allowing access through alternative interfaces like Tweetdeck unlike say Facebook.
Also props for letting you to just straight block in the normal way the account behind an ad you see.
The word thing is that the « Home » feed is soooo bad. Twitter switched me to the home feed without my knowledge and I was like « wtf this tweet is 2 months old + I’ve already liked it + it’s not even active »… I thought it was a cache issue
Reddit as well, though it seems to me Twitter tries harder to make itself hated to its power users. I reckon they've decided they've become so indispensable and irreplaceable they can do whatever they want to maximise profit.
I see a lot of posters saying they don't like the algo feed, but I prefer it. When I launch twitter, I really want to see what's going on, what I've missed and what the current popular posts are. I follow hundreds of accounts, and if I were to go through it all in rev chron order, it would take hours.
In theory I would like this feature for discovery, but the signal to noise ratio for me is terrible, I have tried to use it, blocking 20 topics and it's still a poor experience for me. I could well be an outlier for this feature.
Just use Twitter's lists. I've been using them for a long time.
I added to one of my lists only the accounts that I really want to see on my feed (no old school friends, acquaintances, nor random people that some of the accounts I follow just started following: only sources with added value).
The result? Open your list, and you'll see all the tweets sorted chronologically, only from the accounts you really care to follow.
The quality of the time I spend on Twitter has dramatically increased since this change. No more time wasted scrolling through whatever irrelevant tweets the platform wants me to see. Twitter for me has basically become like an RSS feed aggregator with a curated list of sources to follow, reported in chronological order. And that's exactly what I wanted. Fck their algorithmic sht: I know better than them what I want to read.
I made a little tool a while back for splitting up your follows by their posting frequency, but setting "nlists" to 1 should accomplish what you asked for.
You do unfortunately need a twitter developer account. Also fair warning, as far as I know I'm the only current user, but works on my machine™.
why not just mute accounts you don't wanna see unless you ar elooking for them specifically and also disable retweets from people you are not interested in RT
Twitter "helpfully" shows suggestions, ads, tweets people you follow liked, tweets from people followed by people you follow, replies by people you follow that don't appear in their timeline, etc. etc., and the tweets are sorted however the app decides that day.
Thankfully "Tweak New Twitter" in chrome cleans all that up.
Along with some select muted strings to suppress promoted tweets.
Ofc it also helps that I don't use twitter on mobile at all and confine it's use to my desktop computer.
Been a very good idea these past doomscrolly years.
It's probably also important from an information bubble point of view:
you selected those accounts you follow and with time you start to know them, so you have an idea of their opinions and biases and you can probably better judge of trends of opinion in a specific context.
With an algorithmic feed, it's probably easier to get biased into thinking that what is shown to you is representative of trends in the rest of the world. (even if we are conscious of the information bubble, our brain probably makes this construction).
The one feature I wish Twitter lists had is turning off retweets by account in a list. Currently, a retweet-generous account will pollute the entire list. You can turn off retweets only for accounts you actually follow, and it applies only to your main timeline, not the lists.
True for accounts you follow in Tweetbot, but unfortunately you can't disable retweets for individual members of a list inside Tweetbot. I really wish you could.
Myself I hardly ever open the Twitter front page. I get all my Twitter follows in my RSS reader through RSS-bridge, and then it doesn't matter how Twitter sorts them.
Caveat: I immediately block anyone who adds me to a list (it's only happened 3 or 4 times and it seems spammy). And I've seen a number of other accounts with "don't add me to lists" or equivalent in their bio.
There's a difference between private and public lists. As far as I'm aware, adding someone to a private list does not notify them that they've been added, it just give you a filter and the chronological view of tweets from people you add to the list.
Ah, that could very well be. As I don't use lists (I just sort my feed by chronological), my only connection with lists has been when I've received notifications of being added to them
Interesting that you are so opposed to it. I like lists because it lets me follow topics without having to "follow" an individual, or just to have a subject-matter-focused feed without having to sort through the messy mishmash that is the main one.
In fact, I don't even look at the main feed. I only look at my lists.
Twitter censors the search bar, even hiding tweets that don't violate the TOS from logged in searchers searching for certain bad-PR hashtags, making it impossible to identify the scope or reach or growth rates of certain memes (eg qanon, antivax, war propaganda, etc).
It is supremely disrespectful to tell other adults what they are and are not allowed to read.
"Just" stop donating content and attention to abusive and disrespectful censorship platforms.
You don't counter abuse with workarounds, you leave and stop being abused.
My fear is dutifully curating lists for this purpose -- which would take ages -- only for them to monkey with this feature. I see a lot of people on Twitter who say something like "if you put me in a list, I will block you," which makes me think there's some sort of list-spamming capability currently. (I can't figure out any other reason people wouldn't want to be added to lists...?)
I use the reverse-chron feed almost exclusively. Product Management Twitter has devolved into people with 1-2 years of product experience vomiting out threads of "What I've learned" that have zero insight, and because I follow a lot of legit product people, Twitter thinks I want this other stuff. I hate it.
Lists can be public or private. If they're public, the account being added gets notified. If they're private, there's no notification, and nobody else can see the list or its contents anyway.
"if you put me in a list, I will block you" is almost certainly about public lists, either because the notifs are noisy or because the list may not be a flattering one.
The availability of the chronological timeline is the only reason why Twitter still works for me and Facebook and LinkedIn don't. I keep seeing the same shit on the latter two, despite extensive attempts to train the recommender engine.
Facebook just keeps showing me the same posts over and over again. LinkedIn shows different posts, but they are all so cookie cutter similar that they might as well have been the same. And even more insipid, it will do a repeat of network updates at two weeks and four weeks. Nothing says "we got interesting content" more than reruns!
I'm soooo looking forward to Twitter being uninteresting repeats as well.
> But when I force close and re-open the app when looking at the Latest Tweets column, the Home feed is what Twitter shows first.
Great. Choose between keeping the app always-on or having boring shit first.
234 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadBut I don’t understand how anyone uses their website or the official client. If it wasn’t for a third-party client I think I’d give up pretty fast.
With https://github.com/haoict/twitter-no-ads and https://repo.packix.com/package/com.alwayslatesttimelinetwit...
I absolutely would not use Twitter if I had to use the website.
Just the stuff I want to see in the order it was tweeted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The app now has a tab bar on top with Home and Latest Tweets.
As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline.
But I can't fathom why seemingly no effort has gone into monetizing a chronological timeline. Why is it's foregone conclusion that it won't work with advertising the way the algorithmic was works?
The issue for them I imagine is retention: with chronological, it's likely that when you visit Twitter the first few messages you see are not interesting and you leave. But if they put a tweet that's popular among your social group in front of you? Odds are that's interesting to you and you stick around a bit longer.
I dislike that, to be clear, but I imagine this is the human behavior for >90% of people.
Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating.
Malls try to balance enabling people to find what they are looking for, but also make sure they don't find it too easily so that people can wonder about and be exposed to as many stores as possible.
If you enter the Dubai Mall from the metro, there's a big sign that points to the left and says "Food Court". You'd get to the food court much faster if you turn right.
There's a reason why refrigerated items are usually at the back: fridges usually face a wall. You can have a shelf at the back sometimes but that's not always possible
Also, for those quick purchases you can always go to somewhere closer, a gas station, etc.
In fact in Europe some places do have the quick purchases right in front of the store so you don't need to go around (Tesco as an example).
Also, why would your eggs be in the dairy section?
I went the other day just to look at a dining table. It was only in the 3rd or 4th showroom. Of course, to get out I had to wander through the majority of like 13 or 14 other showrooms because you pretty much can only take the linear path to get to an exit.
I doubt it. They are even marked on in store navigation. Example, https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*ZSJ1cE-FjFzNjIVz8l0a4Q.jp...
You need to know the name of what you're looking for and then use their kiosks to find where the thing is in the warehouse and just pick it up directly.
This trick turns 1 hour trips through Ikea into 5 minute trips.
So I went up to a couple salespeople and asked why. They couldn't say why, just that they did have it in stock at this warehouse and they themselves could ship it for X fee.
I don't really get it. They said maybe they were out of stock at the factory or online order fulfillment center. But the pages said they were available.
The value proposition of the long Ikea walks is the set up rooms showing how the products look in use, allowing you to visualise before you buy. I take a friend and a coffee and take my time at Ikea.
Wonder if the covid-catalyzed uptake on grocery pickup options will change this in any way. I certainly discovered the joys of making grocery errands much more efficient, to the point where the decided majority of my store runs are pickup-only: I don't waste time navigating the store.
(And hey, the store can show me random products based off ML analysis of my purchase history, win-win.)
I dont know if this is really happening. Grocery stores where I go are fairly static. They change layout once in years and larger one have big signs that tell you where what roughly is.
There was a case a few years ago where a Marriott got fined for blocking outside wifi.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/03/marriott-fin...
No, them renting the room to you - when you'll usually be out of it most of the day - is absolutely how they make money. Maybe in Las Vegas the room rate is a loss leader but your average business hotel is 100% making their profit on the room.
I once stayed at a place that had super, super cheap refreshment rates on the mini-fridge. Cheaper if you got them at a store obviously, but not punishing like most other hotels, less than double the supermarket rate. Guess what? I made them tons of money, it was super convenient, I didn't go out of my way to avoid them.
While it's important to know what tweets a user is interacting with, the personalization option can surface more things as "You might like", "You follow x, and he liked", "Interesting tweet on the topics you follow/might like" and so on. Whether or not you choose to interact with anyone or more of those is a signal, and helps with advertising (if advertising is a question of "What tweet/content you are likely to interact with?"). Other than brands, most twitter influencers, or would-be influencers end up spending money on twitter ads to gain followers.
With a reverse chronological timeline, it's hard to surface those tweets from outside the network without a jarring experience. They also realize the power of defaults and hence they decided to take away the default option.
... when they are created.
Social networks are inherently evil, that's their business model: manipulate users into addiction and serve ads.
How do non-evil social networks look like? They're forums, plain old forums.
But you don't become an ultra trillionaire with PhpBB.
Nowadays they are an evil manipulation mess, but I don't think it is an inherit property of social networks.
Phase 2: profit (through using and abusing their users).
Both steps are written in stone in their business plan on day 1, you just don't know it.
As a user you were still in phase 1.
Similar story with image hosting websites. First they don't have ads and load fast and don't really have image restrictions. Then they start adding restrictions and ads.
Before this, we had centuries of businesses who were sustainable by just charging a fair premium on the goods they sold to their customers, and both sides were happy enough with the transaction to continue.
You'll never get enough traction to break through to the mainstream, unless something radical changes.
What's evil about Mastodon, Matrix, Pleroma, diaspora, etc?
I don't know anyone using any of those networks.
Nothing wrong with showing me, and clearly denoting, a tweet that I might like in between other tweets I browse.
Don't understand this black and white thinking.
Whether or not they show topic data for a particular tweet, they generally have it. I only use the chronological timeline, and I cleared out the interests list a year or two back, but they have built up a profile of hundreds of interests for me.
I suspect forcing the ranked timeline on people is all about a small portion of Twitter juicing their engagement metrics, with no grand cross-team strategy in play.
They would just show me random shit basically irregardless of date.. and that's not at all what I wanted. I found it to be an new source- of sorts. I'm not saying a good one, but at least it was somewhat interesting to may see peoples perspective on some topic. But what I found is it would just show me stuff that could be months old, days old etc instead of prioritizing like.. top day things.
I haven't used it during the russia/ukraine time.. but I can't imagine how wildly inaccurate of a picture you would get if you are viewing stuff completely out of date order. Yeah they put the date on the video.. but that doesn't really help, everything is still all over the place.
For all Reddit's faults- I can at least go there, take a look at some of the top headlines in some subreddits.. and know if I see something it's recent unless I am looking otherwise.
With algorithmic timelines the system is deliberately optimizing for "what keeps you on the site", even if it's not new or not something you follow. Hence, you stay on longer and view more ads. There's nothing about chrono that makes advertising less effective; algorithmic timelines just keep people on site and thus keep them as part of your ad inventory.
Simple experiment:
Go to Facebook and use ?sk=h_chr scroll until you "run out" of material, and then check to see if you actually saw all of the recent stuff from a particular friend.
But then maybe that's my fault for curating my timeline to show creators and not influencers/talking heads...
Jokes on them. I block every account that shows promoted tweets and it keeps my timeline ad-free.
I'm actually surprised they don't have promoted tweets override blocklists but hey, if it works.
Or the simpler explanation is that the chronological timeline isn't actually the preferred setting, outside of a small but vocal minority.
If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all? I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate. If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature.
> As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline.
I don't follow this logic. There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.
If I recall correctly, this was the default. Then they introduced the semi curated algorithmic as a feature. Then replaced chronological and got a ton of backlash. They've been playing a game of capitulation and direction ever since.
> There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.
The chronological timeline is your connected accounts + ads. The algorithmic timeline is the same but also some "suggestions." Ostensibly this makes it harder to immediately separate ad from, say, an account your friend follows.
Is this a simple explanation for why the feature automatically turns itself off after a week or two?
> just because the Tweets are ordered differently
This isn't what the feature does. More than half of the content in the algorithmic timeline was not posted or retweeted by someone I follow.
you can justify a lot of things with "the silent majority doesn't mind it". the silent majority is tech-illiterate, and there are a lot of things they are indifferent to. if it wasn't for the loud minority, we'd be advancing into the dystopian future at much faster pace.
>I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate.
the overwhelming majority will always use whichever option is the default
>If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature.
that will eventually happen, and when it does, I'm sure I'll read about how that is a good thing
With the algorithmic feed, you could refresh the page at any time and get a different personalized set of posts that make it feel like your feed is more active than it actually is.
I myself tend to stick on Home. However, there are times when I want to be on Latest, particularly if there’s an event on or developments are happening at a rapid pace.
The old UI seemed ideal to me. It gave people the choice to choose what their default was. Now, they’ve taken that away… to what end? Force pushing people over to Home who expressly don’t want it probably isn’t going to work.
However I’ve heard of very few people that prefer the algorithmic feed on Twitter, might be a bubble effect though.
The big part is time spent I think. I see the same thing with Instagram: I have about 120 accounts that I follow, mostly friends of mine.
I check the feed once a day and after 5 minutes I’m done.
But I also know quite a lot of people that spend hours on Instagrams explore page and with reels.
With your own carefully curated list there is a limited amount of content you can consume, until you inevitably leave the app.
But as you can see with TikTok or Instagram people spend hours on algorithmic feeds.
Operant conditioning and intermittent reinforcement are why.
It’s hard to tell that your actions have changed the kind of user who is most engaged until your platform is destroyed and consists of users who barely pay attention and addicts that feed off of each other and not much else (Facebook).
Metrics lie and optimizing for certain performance metrics ends up optimizing for exploiting human weaknesses which is actually somewhat uncommon in the population, which explains the process of optimizing your platform into irrelevance.
What if it's actually a way to hide specific topics or sentiments from the timeline? If the algorithm of what to show first is a black box, scales can be tipped just like Google does with search results.
If it's a pure chronological timeline, you either have to be blatant in not displaying the tweets you want to suppress, or let people see them.
What they want to use instead is a different, inferior algorithm (for you, or you wouldn't hate it so much), but which is superior for them. That algorithm is not the only profitable algorithm, it is one of many, your preferred system is also algorithmic. This is just an algorithm that uses a black box nobody understands, or even tries to understand, or even tries to read (which they could, they have access to the weights of the neural net), and consequently, which they can claim to have no responsibility or even power over.
They're actually more heuristics, not algorithms. As such, they have all kinds of failures, many intentional. Algorithms (at least in my book) are generally are air-tight, and verifiable. Like you chronological feed, if two items were out of order, you could see it and it would show the algorithm to be wrong. It would have to lie about the date (which you do see sometimes) to fool you.
These heuristics are really just the man behind the curtain, imposing his will in an algorithmically-amplified way. It is driven by a dual goal of profit and political ambitions, with the latter being weighted more highly.
So it's probably just a matter of time before this route is plugged.
Personally I'm closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon. Many in my social circle have already done so.
Oh, while I'm at it: if you want to view Twitter posts without having a Twitter account (or just don't want to see ads and trending crap), check out Nitter[1]. Alternative front-end. It also has minimal JS and is far more resource-efficient (viewing my profile loaded 1.56mb of resources on Nitter, compared to 9.2mb on Twitter)
[0] https://joinmastodon.org/
[1] https://nitter.net/
I did this and I don’t regret it.
There were none for me.
So, given that mastodon is large, and federated, surely the problem is with me right? So, I said fuck it, let's break out the API. I wrote a scraper, seeded with a few least-bad people's profile, programmed it to pull the last ~32 toots & add all connections of the user to scrape breadth-first to get a wide array of perspectives. ~150 servers & 50,000 toots. I then took my general keyword list (~150 items, representing majority of my interests in both layman and technical terms) that I use to evaluate social networks, and search engines, and crunched through the toots.
Results: deep technical terms have accidental hits, generally used either in different context; or scratching almost none of the surface. Wide terms generally pull very low signal, from the general vicinity of conspiracy theories/how bad twitter is/crypto/mastodon is great.
I'd really really would prefer to actually use Mastodon, but
1, the features they offer optimizes against it's own usage (lack of search, lack of discoverability; you can call this positive change, but again, it optimizes against onboarding & finding interesting stuff)
2, because it's federated, there's no-one dedicated to acquiring people who have better use of their time, and
3, the people who are in there, do not, currently, would lead me to level up in directions I care about.
Mastodon represents a set of preferences, and I'm happy for you that it seems to be aligning with yours; it does not aligns with mine, is all I'm saying.
It would be much easier if they allowed to display mutliple accounts at same time, since they allow it separately anyway already
A good solution to this problem (and "growth and engagement" at large) is to make advertising-based business models less profitable (with better and enforced privacy regulation, more liability for the ads they run, or losing Section 230 protection for those who manipulate content's reach to maximize "engagement" as opposed to being a neutral communication platform where the user controls which content is shown to them, etc) so that businesses go back to the old model of the user paying for the service, aligning the incentives of the platform with what the users want.
The userscript also fixes the reverse-chronological issue. There's literally a setting that enables one to force "Latest Tweets First" mode, so it'll switch back to the "latest" feed whenever Twitter has decided that you should be viewing their "home" feed instead.
[0] https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2
I think I'm experiencing a bug like this one here:
https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2/issues/33
i'll look into it
Very good addition: it can also hide engagement counts (replies, RTs and likes), so you can scroll sanely without feeling obliged to like a stupid tweet just because it has 100 likes already.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimaltwitte...
[0] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter
[1] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/issues/78
The only small criticism that I have is that there is no button or keyboard shortcut to quickly disable it in the case that I actually need one of the disabled features). For that you can quickly bring up Firefox' addons dialog via Ctrl+Shift+A though, to disable the addon completely.
Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust.
Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube on every video view, and I can't even speak Chinese.
You are lucky! I obviously share IP at home with my children, but how is my 13 years old daughter getting disgusting commercials (all in Portuguese for some reason??) of "Manscape" products, women's "spray everywhere even there" deodorant, some soap where interracial couple does everything other than THAT under the shower... and few others jaw-droppers I honestly forgot by now. And tons and tons of crypto spam. I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore?? has to be some bot fishing for keywords and nude, if none, then approve.
> I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore??
There's no liability, so why should they waste money on reviewing ads manually?
Hypothesis: Ads are related to browsing habits, your kid's asking questions
If this gets any worse I will just in frustration stop using the platform.
You can easily be shadowbanned by Twitter for complaining about Twitter on Twitter.
They send you accounts fake and delayed notices to drive engagement.
Muting words and phrases has not worked for years.
They interact with other apps and track words you type and use them to push content and ads to you, likely even when you have the setting for third party data disabled.
The interest keywords associated with your account cannot be changed, it is a pool of data gathered from people you follow and what you've typed over the life of running you account, it often locks you into an information bubble that dictates everything you see for the life of each account, and it also ensures that each use has a customized (yet individually/uniquely frustrating) experience that can't properly be explained nor replicated by any other user.
Mind you, I can absolutely see that activity on Twitter has only been going up recently. Which would be great if 80% of it wasn’t self-promotion, crypto babble and spam, plagiarized content, and LinkedIn style “expert” threads.
On top of that, all of the promoted tweets I see are junk content farms.
It hasn’t been an ideal place for connecting with friends for a while, and now it’s becoming an absolute shit hole for decent content or professional communities. What will be left?
Also, the chronological timeline is not ideal once you follow > 100 profiles. One of the issues at hand here is that they removed the “missed” section and replaced with the algorithmic feed. There is no way to catch up with only the most interesting tweets from people you follow, other than scrolling through all of it.
> other than scrolling through all of it.
What do you want? Do you want all latest tweets, or do you want AI to generate a list of good ones?
AI is not inherently evil. Yes, I want to see the most relevant / controversial / liked tweets by people I follow. Most of that doesn't need any complex algorithm in the first place.
What I don't want to see are bubble-inducing "recommended" tweets, or tweets liked by someone I follow (isn't that what retweets are for?), or "topics", or "people you should follow". If I wanted an AI-curated feed I'd just go to facebook or read the news.
2. Add people
3. Read as reverse chronological feed without ads.
Also props for letting you to just straight block in the normal way the account behind an ad you see.
I added to one of my lists only the accounts that I really want to see on my feed (no old school friends, acquaintances, nor random people that some of the accounts I follow just started following: only sources with added value).
The result? Open your list, and you'll see all the tweets sorted chronologically, only from the accounts you really care to follow.
The quality of the time I spend on Twitter has dramatically increased since this change. No more time wasted scrolling through whatever irrelevant tweets the platform wants me to see. Twitter for me has basically become like an RSS feed aggregator with a curated list of sources to follow, reported in chronological order. And that's exactly what I wanted. Fck their algorithmic sht: I know better than them what I want to read.
You do unfortunately need a twitter developer account. Also fair warning, as far as I know I'm the only current user, but works on my machine™.
https://github.com/tauroid/twitterlanes
None of those things happen in lists.
I think my other new favorite is having to click "more replies" after what, 8 tweets? Garbo.
Been a very good idea these past doomscrolly years.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tweak-new-twi...
With an algorithmic feed, it's probably easier to get biased into thinking that what is shown to you is representative of trends in the rest of the world. (even if we are conscious of the information bubble, our brain probably makes this construction).
If only Twitter had some mechanism like that from the start! It'd be so much more simple!
I don't think anyone's ever made a website that you could just pick who's content you wanted to see though.
I'm a relatively new Twitter user and I've been making heavy use of the list functionality. So what's the down side?
In fact, I don't even look at the main feed. I only look at my lists.
It is supremely disrespectful to tell other adults what they are and are not allowed to read.
"Just" stop donating content and attention to abusive and disrespectful censorship platforms.
You don't counter abuse with workarounds, you leave and stop being abused.
I use the reverse-chron feed almost exclusively. Product Management Twitter has devolved into people with 1-2 years of product experience vomiting out threads of "What I've learned" that have zero insight, and because I follow a lot of legit product people, Twitter thinks I want this other stuff. I hate it.
"if you put me in a list, I will block you" is almost certainly about public lists, either because the notifs are noisy or because the list may not be a flattering one.
Chronological is not the default setting for lists.
You basically have to be a dedicated Twitter user to enjoy it.
The availability of the chronological timeline is the only reason why Twitter still works for me and Facebook and LinkedIn don't. I keep seeing the same shit on the latter two, despite extensive attempts to train the recommender engine.
Facebook just keeps showing me the same posts over and over again. LinkedIn shows different posts, but they are all so cookie cutter similar that they might as well have been the same. And even more insipid, it will do a repeat of network updates at two weeks and four weeks. Nothing says "we got interesting content" more than reruns!
I'm soooo looking forward to Twitter being uninteresting repeats as well.
> But when I force close and re-open the app when looking at the Latest Tweets column, the Home feed is what Twitter shows first.
Great. Choose between keeping the app always-on or having boring shit first.
I fear the cookie-cutter similarity of business communications isn't something LinkedIn will be able to fix.
Banality is a borderline essential component of business communications.
I absolutely loathe LinkedIn; it's the social network I resent the most.
Just use one of the 3th party twitter clients… problem solved.
I use “Aviary - for Twitter” on iOS which has no subscription, unlike Tweetbot.