12 ms·

Twitter's new timeline feature

162 points by r721 11y ago

Mithaldu 11y ago
Does this also show tweets i've already seen in my list, or does this only serve to show me tweets twice when i go to the main view? Edit: Either i'm blind, or that setting isn't available everywhere yet.
Touche 11y ago
> We've already seen that people who use this new feature tend to Retweet and Tweet more, creating more live commentary and conversations, which is great for everyone. If that's true don't expect it to be hidden behind a setting for long.
anc84 11y ago
Is that the annoying "While you were away" feature that I have been closing several times a day in the past weeks? I would like to disable it forever but there is no such option.
- Touche 11y ago
  I believe While you were away has been around for a long long time. This new thing does sound very similar though.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Use your browser UserCSS feature to apply: .has-recap { display: none; }
- tomjen3 11y ago
  It does sound like another shitty attempt to show only things they deem relevant. I only follow a small number of people on Twitter _precisely so that I can see everything they post_. I think it might make sense when I look at some of the trending things though. Then they really need to apply filters, especially to the spammers.
- majewsky 11y ago
  I hate "While you were away" with a passion, especially the part where (on mobile) after dismissing it, it asks you "Did you like this?", yet it can't take a hint after the 20th "No".
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    I've come to suspect that it's asking me whether I liked the tweets, not the feature. So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite.
    - dwightgunning 11y ago
      I have NFI how to interpret it either. Which begs the question of what they're doing with the data. The mind boggles.
    - sangnoir 11y ago
      > So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite. On the official android client, you can dismiss the second popup without clicking on "I like this" or "I hate this" by clicking anywhere on the screen. I'm not going to train your stupid robot for your stupid feature.
      - pavel_lishin 11y ago
        I've started doing this, but there's still the problem that those tweets that it thinks I love ... seem to disappear from the timeline. If I see a "you may have missed..." tweet that was sent an hour ago, if I scroll down to that point in my time line, it's not there. All I want is a fucking RSS feed of tweets, tbh, organized by date. Nothing more, nothing less. Go ahead and cram it full of ads, like they've already done - just don't try to fucking sort it for me.
        sangnoir 11y ago
        > there's still the problem that those tweets that it thinks I love ... seem to disappear from the timeline I had not noticed that! I always dismiss the "you may have missed" without reading, it's quite insidious. It's time I changed clients
- dchest 11y ago
  I love this feature! Most of the time I use the old version of Twitter for Mac, but every time go to twitter.com and see "While you were away", I realize that I miss quite a few interesting/important tweets.
- jchendy 11y ago
  I actually really like "while you were away," but from the blog post, I can't tell if/how this new feature is different.
ponyous 11y ago
> To check it out now, just go into the timeline section of your settings and choose 'Show me the best Tweets first'. Am I the only one who can't find timeline section in settings? http://i.imgur.com/kKedYcn.png http://i.imgur.com/kKedYcn.png
- jonknee 11y ago
  No. Perhaps they're rolling it out gradually.
- hockeybias 11y ago
  I cannot find it either...
- swah 11y ago
  Its under Content on the main page I think (but I still don't see the option).
- entelechy0 11y ago
  Whew, I'm not the only one
Sujan 11y ago
What about third party clients?
ericzawo 11y ago
Twitter used to be an amazing social network with ongoing conversation and discourse but lately (The past two years) it's felt increasingly like the anger megaphone. Not sure that's a culture they can stifle with algorithms but I'm optimistic they do.
blakesterz 11y ago
>> Here's how it works. You flip on the feature in your settings; then when you open Twitter after being away for a while... That's perfect, I need to flip it on, just how things like this should be added to anything!
- mmahemoff 11y ago
  It's a setting for now, but they are almost certainly planning to make it the default for all users after some testing and refinement. And ideally remove the setting altogether and make it standard behaviour. Should work well for most users if executed right.
- seanwilson 11y ago
  > That's perfect, I need to flip it on, just how things like this should be added to anything! I really don't have much of an opinion about the Twitter feature, but if a new feature appears in an app that is going to be beneficial to most users, making it off by default guarantees the vast majority of users will never see it.
  - blakesterz 11y ago
    > making it off by default guarantees the vast majority of users will never see it. Good point. I suppose if I'm looking at it as a user I want to be able to turn on new things myself. If I'm looking at it as a creator/developer I want people to use this new awesome thing I spent all this time and money creating that I think will improve things for them.
    - seanwilson 11y ago
      My point is if every new feature was off by default after several months/years of adding new features most users won't have them enabled and more than likely will have a worse experience overall. Turning on the new features by default but with a warning about them and an easy way to turn them off makes perfect sense to me.
dexwiz 11y ago
This will surely end up like Facebook's feed, full of sponsored content. I wonder if Twitter would market this to individual users instead of just companies. What to make sure all your friends see your Tweet? Then spend 1 Twitter Stamp. You can buy 50 Twitter Stampfor $5. You can market it as an equivalent to a real stamp. You pay to ensure that your mail gets delivered, right? Well now you can also pay for your Tweet to be delivered. When information and communication is free, its only time an attention that is scarce. So you should be selling that. Its social media micro transactions. 95% of people would never use it, but that 5% might use it a lot. But you have to make it transparent. You should only push it to people who actively use it. If it gets pushed for every Tweet, it will only highlight the system, which will destroy it.
- Touche 11y ago
  > I wonder if Twitter would market this to individual users instead of just companies. They won't, they don't want user's pennies. It's hyper growth or bust.
  - dexwiz 11y ago
    At 300 million active users (exact numbers debated), if even 1% paid $10 a month for promoted Tweets, that's 30 million a month. That's not pennies. King Games and Supercell (Clash of Clans), have shown that microtransactions are a profitable enterprise when you abuse human reward systems. What better reward to abuse than attention?
    - Touche 11y ago
      > That's not pennies. To Twitter's shareholders, yes it is. You can make that much with just a few large marketing deals, that's their end game.
edoceo 11y ago
Ha-ha, "important" tweets :)
ebbv 11y ago
This is a terrible change. Twitter has been trying this feature out for a long time and every time a sample of it has come up in my Timeline I Dismiss it and when they ask "Did you like this?" I said "No." The strength of Twitter is that the timeline is always current whenever I bring it up, and I can follow back in time clearly as I scroll through. Messing with that is a huge mistake.
- wiredfool 11y ago
  What's the point of asking if I like something if every single time I say no, they ignore it. But the one time I accidentally click on promote a tweet, I get ads for twitter in my stream and a followup email.
chc4 11y ago
People should check out GNU Social. Lots of people have migrated over to it (quitter.se being the biggest instance) with the whole #RIPTwitter controversy. It's entirely open source, has a twitter-like frontend you can install, and is federated across instances so even if one node starts with changes you don't like you can switch to another one and still talk to the entire network. quitter.se is moderated against hatespeech and nsfw...but other instances aren't, with ones like freezepeach.xyz being explicitally for freedom of speech. And you can talk to anyone on any instance from anywhere.
- dilap 11y ago
  The banner at the top say's "shitposter's and conservatives" might want to check out other services. Nice start. The entire TOS is a marvel of blackwhite-style thinking. Because "users who harass others" and "racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia" are "in practice limitations of free speech," we get the following, quite remarkable policy: "Moderators can exclude users from appearing in the public timeline it at any moment, without warning, permanently or temporarily. Consider it a privilege to be published in the public timeline, not a right." Wow! Such free speech!
  - evan_ 11y ago
    Please, explain how it's a limit of "free speech" to not be published. I had no idea the constitutional abuses The New York Times was subjecting me to by not running my Farscape episode recaps!
    - dilap 11y ago
      Who said anything about the US constitution or constitutional abuses? Within a platform (such as twitter or quitter), the platform-runner is analogous to the government. The TOS (analogous to laws in a traditional government) can choose to value free-speech, or not. What chafes me is the Orwellian language. To avoid "limitations of free speech," moderators can "exclude user's at any moment...without warning." Unless you're at a pretty advanced doublethink level, that is certainly not a free-speech-enhancing policy. It would be more honest and less scary if proponents of such policies simply admitted they were prioritizing other goals.
jeffisabelle 11y ago
> We've already seen that people who use this new feature tend to Retweet and Tweet more, creating more live commentary and conversations I really don't like this trend. The same thing happened with facebook with notifications. They looked at the data and figured that when people have notifications they tend to open the app more. Then started to send tens of unwanted notifications every day. (Which comes from eg. groups that I never joined, or games etc.) Result: hard blocking notifications from the mobile OS level. I hope twitter doesn't follow the same path. (Actually they already do this at some level with 'your friend x & y liked tweet z' notifications) These retention things just kill the apps that I already love. But since the trend is this way, it is probably working out for majority of people and not for me.
- distances 11y ago
  > Result: hard blocking notifications from the mobile OS level. For me the result was uninstalling Facebook. The app was showing daily notifications for people it thinks I could follow, with no options to disable the feature. This was fixed at some point, so I guess the user feedback got through.
  - tenpies 11y ago
    Ditto. The minute the official Twitter client started sending irrelevant notifications I uninstalled and switched Twitter clients. Interestingly enough one of their 5 things this quarter is going to be "improved developer support". I wonder how they'll balance this with third-party Twitter clients that intentionally filter out official marketing efforts.
DangerousPie 11y ago
I know I'm going against the grain here but I think a feature like this actually makes a lot of sense. Maybe I am not as heavy a Twitter user as other people here, but I hate how easily I can miss important tweets if I just don't check my feed for a few hours. Since I am also on a different time zone than many people I follow, I end up having to catch up on hours of tweets every morning by scrolling down the page for ages. Otherwise, I can easily miss extremely relevant/interesting things. If this feature allows me to quickly get an overview over the most interesting tweets (and I can turn it off when I am following the feed more closely) that's great!
- talideon 11y ago
  I don't think people care so much about the addition of anything so much as the lack of any possibility of permanently turning it off. At least in this case, it's optional, but the related 'stuff you might have missed' 'feature' isn't. I personally really hate this kind of thing as it clutters up my feed, and it never gives anything I care about. The value of Twitter for me come from the reverse-chronological feed, not this kind of thing.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Yeah, this seems like it might be useful for people who follow loads of accounts. I follow about 40, and I want to read literally everything all of them say. So long as it doesn't fuck up that use-case (e.g. by remaining optional), I'm fine with it.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    Seconded. I regularly prune the list of accounts I follow, so that I don't spend too much time with Twitter but still get to read everything from those people that I find interesting.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    I agree. It seems to me that Twitter is the wrong tool to use if you're trying to communicate important things that must not be missed, or if you're trying to read the same.
inatreecrown 11y ago
this feels half-arsed at best
Amorymeltzer 11y ago
Maybe I'm reading this differently, but isn't this the perfect solution? - If you want it, you can have it. - If you don't, you aren't forced to. - It's opt-in This will probably be pilloried — as it appears to already be here — since I suspect the #RIPTwitter damage is already done, but this does sound like a reasonable compromise. New feature that might get more people using and engaging in the system but won't change anything for people who don't want it. How is this not a win-win?
- talideon 11y ago
  It's a win-win if it means it replaces the 'stuff you might've missed' nonsense, which isn't opt-in.
- benten10 11y ago
  Naah. As I mention in a comment elsewhere in the thread, this makes twitter into more of a popularity contest from a 'creator' point of view. Right now, you're pretty much guaranteed your friends will see your feed no matter what. Once they opt-in, (and don't remember/bother to opt in me into their 'real' feed) my voice is lost in the cacophony of other celebs. What this is essentially doing is fragmenting the core twitter experience that most users are currently in for, for a more fb-like feature. It matters to you even if you don't opt in, because that changes how your friends see your tweets.
- dilap 11y ago
  It's opt-in for a couple of weeks, and then they're flipping it for everyone.
miseg 11y ago
They do quite a good job at picking out the "best tweets" aleady for sending weekly summary emails. So having that selection of tweets in the UI is a good idea, I think.
tedmiston 11y ago
Am I the only one not seeing it in Settings on desktop? > Under Content, look for Timeline and toggle the box next to Show me the best Tweets first to change the setting. There are 4 subsections under Content for me: Country, Tweet media, Video Tweets, and Your Twitter archive. Edit: (U.S.)
- abritishguy 11y ago
  Not the only one, I wonder if it is US only (I'm UK)
benten10 11y ago
As the resident Twitter fanboy, I'd like to point out something most people here (and elsewhere) who support the change seem to be missing out. We (Twitter users) are not as much worried about our stream being polluted, as much as OUR tweets not being seen. Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it. You don't need to reach out for popularity, because they'll see it anyway. Once it becomes an algorithmically-defined popularity contest, it gets very similar to Facebook, something that most of die-hard twitter fans don't want this to be. Yes, we think the 'algorithmic' feed is going to suck in terms of our streams, but also that our tweets will get lost in all the celebrity noise. Twitter reallllyyy doesn't seem to get that aspect of the complaints. This is more of a celeb-pandering move than to improve user experience. So by giving my followers the option only see popularly selected tweets, you're already shutting them off me. Yeah, they may not always like my tweets, but they would like to see them once in a while (as I will want them to). To summarize: We (existing twitter users) had a contract, an expectation-- that our timelines were going to be chronological, and we would see everything. Twitter is trying to change that, and changing our expectations WHILE we are using it. My guess is, it thinks the 'network effect' makes it too big to fail, and doing this will bring in more of the fb-crowd. By doing this, it is alienating us those who were here for precisely 'not-like-fb' features. I am mad. Very mad. If this is made the default, this is going to be another 'google-killed-reader' rage.
- dorfsmay 11y ago
  You're assuming that all twitter users are constantly online, and constantly checking tweets. I check twitter once or twice a day. I don't care about their algo, I treat twitter like a mailing list (follow few people, read all their tweets).
- Touche 11y ago
  You're not a profitable demographic for them. The demographic they want is those who use social media primarily to talk to friends. That demo doesn't have dual monitors running all day with twitter in one window. They want the demo that will click on their ads, you probably ignore them.
- DangerousPie 11y ago
Jordrok 11y ago
Hang on... Didn't Jack Dorsey explicitly state that they weren't going to do this just a few days ago?[1] "We never planned to reorder timelines next week." I guess you could argue that the timeline isn't "reordered" since the top tweets will still be in reverse chronological order and then whatever comes afterwards will also be in chronological order, but that's still some seriously weasely language. I guess that just goes to show how effective Twitter is as a medium for expressing complex ideas... [1]https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968 https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968
- maus42 11y ago
  Well, looks like it's opt-in at least for now, so probably your timeline will not be reordered at all if you don't want to during this week.
- bronlund 11y ago
  Chronologically? How did you managed that?
ryandrake 11y ago
What the heck is an "important tweet?" Isn't that like a dry raindrop?
- tommoor 11y ago
  Maybe 'interesting tweet' would have been a better choice of words :)
- VLM 11y ago
  One someone paid to have promoted. Or is a part of a much larger marketing/branding deal.
lukewrites 11y ago
I think twitter would be better off embracing lists. I follow relatively few people because of the firehose effect. My attitude towards the people I follow is that I like seeing their tweets, but I don't really care if I miss them. News would be a good example of this. It's great to get news or sports tweets in the moment, but they're probably not tweets I'm going to go back through later to find out what happened. On the other hand, I have a number of lists, whose members I do not follow, but whose members tweets I do want to see. I probably spend more time in these lists than I do on my timeline. The lists are for specific types of information ("must reads", "python", "humor"). The more focused (fewer people in) the list, the more I value not missing the tweets. The twitter app makes lists very inconvenient to get to, which is too bad. I like the moments feature, but wind up using Tweetbot (or another alternative app) because I want easy access to my lists.
- kin 11y ago
  I second lists. I can view lists easily with TweetDeck, but organizing lists is a chore. How about themed lists & channels based on category? Make a channel called Fashion or a channel called Movies and it would more or less operate like a subreddit with moderators. I think it would be more engaging. There's too much self managing and noise right now with Twitter. I pretty much have to have a separate account in order to efficiently dive into the different networks. Let me give two use cases. Say there's a basketball player and he tweets another basketball player and as a user it's fun to retweet/share/follow these conversations. Then let's say I'm also into indie games and this one indie developer tweets a sneak peek to a new release, and some game blogger talks about it. As a user, again, it's fun to retweet/share/follow this. I can't easily do this. Content is slapped together in a shitty form of lists and I continue to miss important things and I get jealous of other people's serendipitous luck in enjoying these conversations I would love to be a part of. If Twitter can figure this out, they would do well.
  - lukewrites 11y ago
    It's crazy how hard it can be to follow conversations on twitter, and seems like a huge loss. To do better, I think twitter should look at how Sina Weibo does it. Weibo started out as a complete rip-off, but wound up coming up with some very useful ideas before zombie accounts and government censorship ran it all into the ground.
huskyr 11y ago
What i have been doing for years to fix the 'missing important tweets' problem: create a list with the most important people, and set that as your main timeline. The official client doesn't have this feature, but third-party clients like Tweetbot and Echofon do. Works for me. I don't really understand why Twitter doesn't simply re-use an already working mechanism (lists) that they have neglected for quite a while. Maybe they could autofill a list with suggestions ("important people" or something) and present that as an alternative timeline.
gdulli 11y ago
It's diluting (and once the opt-in option goes away, removing) the important and unique aspect of Twitter. There's no way that removing what makes Twitter unique will make it a better or more successful product outside of the short term. "The Verge spoke to two users who have been testing the new timeline for a few months. Neither particularly liked it. "I started to get used to it but I still think that it is a terrible idea," Twitter user Robin Bonny told me. "It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline. It makes it extremely hard to follow events, and destroys one of the core values of Twitter, in my opinion." Another user, Coady DiBiase, was only slightly more positive. "It's definitely nice in terms of catching up on things I might've missed, but it's a departure from the core idea of Twitter, so overall it complicates things."" http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10927874/twitter-algorithmic-timeline http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10927874/twitter-algorithmi...
swang 11y ago
Here is something I want: Marc Andreessen wrote something about colonialism and India last night, and today he apologized for it. I didn't see the original tweet so how about using all the Twitter data scientists to help me figure out context? Assuming that he didn't delete it already. I guess what I want is when someone subtweets, to have a link to the tweet it's subtweeting about. Twitter's website is a functional mess and having to scroll timelines for context is a huge time sink.
- rohitnair 11y ago
  In this case, he did delete the tweet soon after.
  - swang 11y ago
    Yeah I figured this out once I read the article about it on recode. I am pretty sure a lot of twitter power users would freak out over this kind of feature. One that integrates something similar to moments, but within the context of your timeline. But twitter is a global product so when I wake up in the morning in the USA and see something like that apology tweet. I don't want to have to dig to figure out what's going on.
AlexWest 11y ago
If twitter goes full algo I will stop using it just like I did Facebook as soon as they stopped showing me everything in chronological order.
mah0use 11y ago
This is a stab on the back of the feature most of us signed Twitter for: seeing what our friends were doing in real time. If they think I'd be happier using Facebook, well they are mistaken.
alpb 11y ago
I can't see this feature. Has it not rolled out to everyone yet?
bronlund 11y ago
As if the timeline wasn't fucked up already. Why even call it that?
danols 11y ago
So I am going to assume that they are not going to show me the same 'important' tweet more than once!?! Or I am going to loose my shit..
davidpatrick 11y ago
Screw the Facebook copycat. I want a quick filter by my lists. Right now I only follow other deveopers, and have narrowed my usage of Twitter for that one use case. When I start following more than one "circle", the feed is overwhelming and I end up never looking at it. I could even see a Moments section that is fed off people you follow.
Walark 11y ago
Why not just adding a colon feature like tweetdeck, its way more efficient than having an algorithm choosing what is relevant or less relevant for me

162 points by r721 11y ago

Does this also show tweets i've already seen in my list, or does this only serve to show me tweets twice when i go to the main view? Edit: Either i'm blind, or that setting isn't available everywhere yet.

Touche 11y ago

> We've already seen that people who use this new feature tend to Retweet and Tweet more, creating more live commentary and conversations, which is great for everyone. If that's true don't expect it to be hidden behind a setting for long.

anc84 11y ago

Is that the annoying "While you were away" feature that I have been closing several times a day in the past weeks? I would like to disable it forever but there is no such option.

Touche 11y ago
I believe While you were away has been around for a long long time. This new thing does sound very similar though.
Mithaldu 11y ago
Use your browser UserCSS feature to apply: .has-recap { display: none; }
tomjen3 11y ago
It does sound like another shitty attempt to show only things they deem relevant. I only follow a small number of people on Twitter _precisely so that I can see everything they post_. I think it might make sense when I look at some of the trending things though. Then they really need to apply filters, especially to the spammers.
majewsky 11y ago
I hate "While you were away" with a passion, especially the part where (on mobile) after dismissing it, it asks you "Did you like this?", yet it can't take a hint after the 20th "No".
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  I've come to suspect that it's asking me whether I liked the tweets, not the feature. So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite.
  - dwightgunning 11y ago
    I have NFI how to interpret it either. Which begs the question of what they're doing with the data. The mind boggles.
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    > So every time I tell it "I hate this", it thinks I actually dislike the people and tweets, which is actually the opposite. On the official android client, you can dismiss the second popup without clicking on "I like this" or "I hate this" by clicking anywhere on the screen. I'm not going to train your stupid robot for your stupid feature.
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      I've started doing this, but there's still the problem that those tweets that it thinks I love ... seem to disappear from the timeline. If I see a "you may have missed..." tweet that was sent an hour ago, if I scroll down to that point in my time line, it's not there. All I want is a fucking RSS feed of tweets, tbh, organized by date. Nothing more, nothing less. Go ahead and cram it full of ads, like they've already done - just don't try to fucking sort it for me.
      - sangnoir 11y ago
        > there's still the problem that those tweets that it thinks I love ... seem to disappear from the timeline I had not noticed that! I always dismiss the "you may have missed" without reading, it's quite insidious. It's time I changed clients
dchest 11y ago
I love this feature! Most of the time I use the old version of Twitter for Mac, but every time go to twitter.com and see "While you were away", I realize that I miss quite a few interesting/important tweets.
jchendy 11y ago
I actually really like "while you were away," but from the blog post, I can't tell if/how this new feature is different.

ponyous 11y ago

> To check it out now, just go into the timeline section of your settings and choose 'Show me the best Tweets first'. Am I the only one who can't find timeline section in settings? http://i.imgur.com/kKedYcn.png http://i.imgur.com/kKedYcn.png

jonknee 11y ago
No. Perhaps they're rolling it out gradually.
hockeybias 11y ago
I cannot find it either...
swah 11y ago
Its under Content on the main page I think (but I still don't see the option).
entelechy0 11y ago
Whew, I'm not the only one

Sujan 11y ago

What about third party clients?

ericzawo 11y ago

Twitter used to be an amazing social network with ongoing conversation and discourse but lately (The past two years) it's felt increasingly like the anger megaphone. Not sure that's a culture they can stifle with algorithms but I'm optimistic they do.

blakesterz 11y ago

>> Here's how it works. You flip on the feature in your settings; then when you open Twitter after being away for a while... That's perfect, I need to flip it on, just how things like this should be added to anything!

mmahemoff 11y ago
It's a setting for now, but they are almost certainly planning to make it the default for all users after some testing and refinement. And ideally remove the setting altogether and make it standard behaviour. Should work well for most users if executed right.
seanwilson 11y ago
> That's perfect, I need to flip it on, just how things like this should be added to anything! I really don't have much of an opinion about the Twitter feature, but if a new feature appears in an app that is going to be beneficial to most users, making it off by default guarantees the vast majority of users will never see it.
- blakesterz 11y ago
  > making it off by default guarantees the vast majority of users will never see it. Good point. I suppose if I'm looking at it as a user I want to be able to turn on new things myself. If I'm looking at it as a creator/developer I want people to use this new awesome thing I spent all this time and money creating that I think will improve things for them.
  - seanwilson 11y ago
    My point is if every new feature was off by default after several months/years of adding new features most users won't have them enabled and more than likely will have a worse experience overall. Turning on the new features by default but with a warning about them and an easy way to turn them off makes perfect sense to me.

dexwiz 11y ago

This will surely end up like Facebook's feed, full of sponsored content. I wonder if Twitter would market this to individual users instead of just companies. What to make sure all your friends see your Tweet? Then spend 1 Twitter Stamp. You can buy 50 Twitter Stampfor $5. You can market it as an equivalent to a real stamp. You pay to ensure that your mail gets delivered, right? Well now you can also pay for your Tweet to be delivered. When information and communication is free, its only time an attention that is scarce. So you should be selling that. Its social media micro transactions. 95% of people would never use it, but that 5% might use it a lot. But you have to make it transparent. You should only push it to people who actively use it. If it gets pushed for every Tweet, it will only highlight the system, which will destroy it.

Touche 11y ago
> I wonder if Twitter would market this to individual users instead of just companies. They won't, they don't want user's pennies. It's hyper growth or bust.
- dexwiz 11y ago
  At 300 million active users (exact numbers debated), if even 1% paid $10 a month for promoted Tweets, that's 30 million a month. That's not pennies. King Games and Supercell (Clash of Clans), have shown that microtransactions are a profitable enterprise when you abuse human reward systems. What better reward to abuse than attention?
  - Touche 11y ago
    > That's not pennies. To Twitter's shareholders, yes it is. You can make that much with just a few large marketing deals, that's their end game.

edoceo 11y ago

Ha-ha, "important" tweets :)

ebbv 11y ago

This is a terrible change. Twitter has been trying this feature out for a long time and every time a sample of it has come up in my Timeline I Dismiss it and when they ask "Did you like this?" I said "No." The strength of Twitter is that the timeline is always current whenever I bring it up, and I can follow back in time clearly as I scroll through. Messing with that is a huge mistake.

wiredfool 11y ago
What's the point of asking if I like something if every single time I say no, they ignore it. But the one time I accidentally click on promote a tweet, I get ads for twitter in my stream and a followup email.

chc4 11y ago

People should check out GNU Social. Lots of people have migrated over to it (quitter.se being the biggest instance) with the whole #RIPTwitter controversy. It's entirely open source, has a twitter-like frontend you can install, and is federated across instances so even if one node starts with changes you don't like you can switch to another one and still talk to the entire network. quitter.se is moderated against hatespeech and nsfw...but other instances aren't, with ones like freezepeach.xyz being explicitally for freedom of speech. And you can talk to anyone on any instance from anywhere.

dilap 11y ago
The banner at the top say's "shitposter's and conservatives" might want to check out other services. Nice start. The entire TOS is a marvel of blackwhite-style thinking. Because "users who harass others" and "racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia" are "in practice limitations of free speech," we get the following, quite remarkable policy: "Moderators can exclude users from appearing in the public timeline it at any moment, without warning, permanently or temporarily. Consider it a privilege to be published in the public timeline, not a right." Wow! Such free speech!
- evan_ 11y ago
  Please, explain how it's a limit of "free speech" to not be published. I had no idea the constitutional abuses The New York Times was subjecting me to by not running my Farscape episode recaps!
  - dilap 11y ago
    Who said anything about the US constitution or constitutional abuses? Within a platform (such as twitter or quitter), the platform-runner is analogous to the government. The TOS (analogous to laws in a traditional government) can choose to value free-speech, or not. What chafes me is the Orwellian language. To avoid "limitations of free speech," moderators can "exclude user's at any moment...without warning." Unless you're at a pretty advanced doublethink level, that is certainly not a free-speech-enhancing policy. It would be more honest and less scary if proponents of such policies simply admitted they were prioritizing other goals.

jeffisabelle 11y ago

> We've already seen that people who use this new feature tend to Retweet and Tweet more, creating more live commentary and conversations I really don't like this trend. The same thing happened with facebook with notifications. They looked at the data and figured that when people have notifications they tend to open the app more. Then started to send tens of unwanted notifications every day. (Which comes from eg. groups that I never joined, or games etc.) Result: hard blocking notifications from the mobile OS level. I hope twitter doesn't follow the same path. (Actually they already do this at some level with 'your friend x & y liked tweet z' notifications) These retention things just kill the apps that I already love. But since the trend is this way, it is probably working out for majority of people and not for me.

distances 11y ago
> Result: hard blocking notifications from the mobile OS level. For me the result was uninstalling Facebook. The app was showing daily notifications for people it thinks I could follow, with no options to disable the feature. This was fixed at some point, so I guess the user feedback got through.
- tenpies 11y ago
  Ditto. The minute the official Twitter client started sending irrelevant notifications I uninstalled and switched Twitter clients. Interestingly enough one of their 5 things this quarter is going to be "improved developer support". I wonder how they'll balance this with third-party Twitter clients that intentionally filter out official marketing efforts.

DangerousPie 11y ago

I know I'm going against the grain here but I think a feature like this actually makes a lot of sense. Maybe I am not as heavy a Twitter user as other people here, but I hate how easily I can miss important tweets if I just don't check my feed for a few hours. Since I am also on a different time zone than many people I follow, I end up having to catch up on hours of tweets every morning by scrolling down the page for ages. Otherwise, I can easily miss extremely relevant/interesting things. If this feature allows me to quickly get an overview over the most interesting tweets (and I can turn it off when I am following the feed more closely) that's great!

talideon 11y ago
I don't think people care so much about the addition of anything so much as the lack of any possibility of permanently turning it off. At least in this case, it's optional, but the related 'stuff you might have missed' 'feature' isn't. I personally really hate this kind of thing as it clutters up my feed, and it never gives anything I care about. The value of Twitter for me come from the reverse-chronological feed, not this kind of thing.
coldpie 11y ago
Yeah, this seems like it might be useful for people who follow loads of accounts. I follow about 40, and I want to read literally everything all of them say. So long as it doesn't fuck up that use-case (e.g. by remaining optional), I'm fine with it.
- majewsky 11y ago
  Seconded. I regularly prune the list of accounts I follow, so that I don't spend too much time with Twitter but still get to read everything from those people that I find interesting.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  I agree. It seems to me that Twitter is the wrong tool to use if you're trying to communicate important things that must not be missed, or if you're trying to read the same.

inatreecrown 11y ago

this feels half-arsed at best

Amorymeltzer 11y ago

Maybe I'm reading this differently, but isn't this the perfect solution? - If you want it, you can have it. - If you don't, you aren't forced to. - It's opt-in This will probably be pilloried — as it appears to already be here — since I suspect the #RIPTwitter damage is already done, but this does sound like a reasonable compromise. New feature that might get more people using and engaging in the system but won't change anything for people who don't want it. How is this not a win-win?

talideon 11y ago
It's a win-win if it means it replaces the 'stuff you might've missed' nonsense, which isn't opt-in.
benten10 11y ago
Naah. As I mention in a comment elsewhere in the thread, this makes twitter into more of a popularity contest from a 'creator' point of view. Right now, you're pretty much guaranteed your friends will see your feed no matter what. Once they opt-in, (and don't remember/bother to opt in me into their 'real' feed) my voice is lost in the cacophony of other celebs. What this is essentially doing is fragmenting the core twitter experience that most users are currently in for, for a more fb-like feature. It matters to you even if you don't opt in, because that changes how your friends see your tweets.
dilap 11y ago
It's opt-in for a couple of weeks, and then they're flipping it for everyone.

miseg 11y ago

They do quite a good job at picking out the "best tweets" aleady for sending weekly summary emails. So having that selection of tweets in the UI is a good idea, I think.

tedmiston 11y ago

Am I the only one not seeing it in Settings on desktop? > Under Content, look for Timeline and toggle the box next to Show me the best Tweets first to change the setting. There are 4 subsections under Content for me: Country, Tweet media, Video Tweets, and Your Twitter archive. Edit: (U.S.)

abritishguy 11y ago
Not the only one, I wonder if it is US only (I'm UK)

benten10 11y ago

As the resident Twitter fanboy, I'd like to point out something most people here (and elsewhere) who support the change seem to be missing out. We (Twitter users) are not as much worried about our stream being polluted, as much as OUR tweets not being seen. Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it. You don't need to reach out for popularity, because they'll see it anyway. Once it becomes an algorithmically-defined popularity contest, it gets very similar to Facebook, something that most of die-hard twitter fans don't want this to be. Yes, we think the 'algorithmic' feed is going to suck in terms of our streams, but also that our tweets will get lost in all the celebrity noise. Twitter reallllyyy doesn't seem to get that aspect of the complaints. This is more of a celeb-pandering move than to improve user experience. So by giving my followers the option only see popularly selected tweets, you're already shutting them off me. Yeah, they may not always like my tweets, but they would like to see them once in a while (as I will want them to). To summarize: We (existing twitter users) had a contract, an expectation-- that our timelines were going to be chronological, and we would see everything. Twitter is trying to change that, and changing our expectations WHILE we are using it. My guess is, it thinks the 'network effect' makes it too big to fail, and doing this will bring in more of the fb-crowd. By doing this, it is alienating us those who were here for precisely 'not-like-fb' features. I am mad. Very mad. If this is made the default, this is going to be another 'google-killed-reader' rage.

dorfsmay 11y ago
You're assuming that all twitter users are constantly online, and constantly checking tweets. I check twitter once or twice a day. I don't care about their algo, I treat twitter like a mailing list (follow few people, read all their tweets).
Touche 11y ago
You're not a profitable demographic for them. The demographic they want is those who use social media primarily to talk to friends. That demo doesn't have dual monitors running all day with twitter in one window. They want the demo that will click on their ads, you probably ignore them.
DangerousPie 11y ago

Jordrok 11y ago

Hang on... Didn't Jack Dorsey explicitly state that they weren't going to do this just a few days ago?[1] "We never planned to reorder timelines next week." I guess you could argue that the timeline isn't "reordered" since the top tweets will still be in reverse chronological order and then whatever comes afterwards will also be in chronological order, but that's still some seriously weasely language. I guess that just goes to show how effective Twitter is as a medium for expressing complex ideas... [1]https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968 https://twitter.com/jack/status/696081566032723968

maus42 11y ago
Well, looks like it's opt-in at least for now, so probably your timeline will not be reordered at all if you don't want to during this week.
bronlund 11y ago
Chronologically? How did you managed that?

ryandrake 11y ago

What the heck is an "important tweet?" Isn't that like a dry raindrop?

tommoor 11y ago
Maybe 'interesting tweet' would have been a better choice of words :)
VLM 11y ago
One someone paid to have promoted. Or is a part of a much larger marketing/branding deal.

lukewrites 11y ago

I think twitter would be better off embracing lists. I follow relatively few people because of the firehose effect. My attitude towards the people I follow is that I like seeing their tweets, but I don't really care if I miss them. News would be a good example of this. It's great to get news or sports tweets in the moment, but they're probably not tweets I'm going to go back through later to find out what happened. On the other hand, I have a number of lists, whose members I do not follow, but whose members tweets I do want to see. I probably spend more time in these lists than I do on my timeline. The lists are for specific types of information ("must reads", "python", "humor"). The more focused (fewer people in) the list, the more I value not missing the tweets. The twitter app makes lists very inconvenient to get to, which is too bad. I like the moments feature, but wind up using Tweetbot (or another alternative app) because I want easy access to my lists.

kin 11y ago
I second lists. I can view lists easily with TweetDeck, but organizing lists is a chore. How about themed lists & channels based on category? Make a channel called Fashion or a channel called Movies and it would more or less operate like a subreddit with moderators. I think it would be more engaging. There's too much self managing and noise right now with Twitter. I pretty much have to have a separate account in order to efficiently dive into the different networks. Let me give two use cases. Say there's a basketball player and he tweets another basketball player and as a user it's fun to retweet/share/follow these conversations. Then let's say I'm also into indie games and this one indie developer tweets a sneak peek to a new release, and some game blogger talks about it. As a user, again, it's fun to retweet/share/follow this. I can't easily do this. Content is slapped together in a shitty form of lists and I continue to miss important things and I get jealous of other people's serendipitous luck in enjoying these conversations I would love to be a part of. If Twitter can figure this out, they would do well.
- lukewrites 11y ago
  It's crazy how hard it can be to follow conversations on twitter, and seems like a huge loss. To do better, I think twitter should look at how Sina Weibo does it. Weibo started out as a complete rip-off, but wound up coming up with some very useful ideas before zombie accounts and government censorship ran it all into the ground.

huskyr 11y ago

What i have been doing for years to fix the 'missing important tweets' problem: create a list with the most important people, and set that as your main timeline. The official client doesn't have this feature, but third-party clients like Tweetbot and Echofon do. Works for me. I don't really understand why Twitter doesn't simply re-use an already working mechanism (lists) that they have neglected for quite a while. Maybe they could autofill a list with suggestions ("important people" or something) and present that as an alternative timeline.

gdulli 11y ago

It's diluting (and once the opt-in option goes away, removing) the important and unique aspect of Twitter. There's no way that removing what makes Twitter unique will make it a better or more successful product outside of the short term. "The Verge spoke to two users who have been testing the new timeline for a few months. Neither particularly liked it. "I started to get used to it but I still think that it is a terrible idea," Twitter user Robin Bonny told me. "It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline. It makes it extremely hard to follow events, and destroys one of the core values of Twitter, in my opinion." Another user, Coady DiBiase, was only slightly more positive. "It's definitely nice in terms of catching up on things I might've missed, but it's a departure from the core idea of Twitter, so overall it complicates things."" http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10927874/twitter-algorithmic-timeline http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/6/10927874/twitter-algorithmi...

swang 11y ago

Here is something I want: Marc Andreessen wrote something about colonialism and India last night, and today he apologized for it. I didn't see the original tweet so how about using all the Twitter data scientists to help me figure out context? Assuming that he didn't delete it already. I guess what I want is when someone subtweets, to have a link to the tweet it's subtweeting about. Twitter's website is a functional mess and having to scroll timelines for context is a huge time sink.

rohitnair 11y ago
In this case, he did delete the tweet soon after.
- swang 11y ago
  Yeah I figured this out once I read the article about it on recode. I am pretty sure a lot of twitter power users would freak out over this kind of feature. One that integrates something similar to moments, but within the context of your timeline. But twitter is a global product so when I wake up in the morning in the USA and see something like that apology tweet. I don't want to have to dig to figure out what's going on.

AlexWest 11y ago

If twitter goes full algo I will stop using it just like I did Facebook as soon as they stopped showing me everything in chronological order.

mah0use 11y ago

This is a stab on the back of the feature most of us signed Twitter for: seeing what our friends were doing in real time. If they think I'd be happier using Facebook, well they are mistaken.

alpb 11y ago

I can't see this feature. Has it not rolled out to everyone yet?

bronlund 11y ago

As if the timeline wasn't fucked up already. Why even call it that?

danols 11y ago

So I am going to assume that they are not going to show me the same 'important' tweet more than once!?! Or I am going to loose my shit..

davidpatrick 11y ago

Screw the Facebook copycat. I want a quick filter by my lists. Right now I only follow other deveopers, and have narrowed my usage of Twitter for that one use case. When I start following more than one "circle", the feed is overwhelming and I end up never looking at it. I could even see a Moments section that is fed off people you follow.

Walark 11y ago

Why not just adding a colon feature like tweetdeck, its way more efficient than having an algorithm choosing what is relevant or less relevant for me