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They used to do that. They had two different news feeds, one with their algorithm and one that was just a real-time feed. Then they scrapped the real-time feed
by reading-at-work 9y ago
They used to do that. They had two different news feeds, one with their algorithm and one that was just a real-time feed. Then they scrapped the real-time feed in favor of their algorithm-based feed. It's not that the real-time was hard to do, it's that the algorithm is more easily monetized.
- niftich 9y agoMoving the feed from 'chronological' to 'algorithmic' obfuscates the true quantity of actual content on the user's timeline, thereby allowing a higher density of ads and other sponsored content without the user necessarily being able to tell or prove. I hypothesized about other benefits and drawbacks here [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12190724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12190724
- rconti 9y agoYup. It was a huge deal in, what, 2008, when they did this? Almost as big as when they got rid of curated content and turned everyone's link-able "interests" into weird generic "likes" (it was a really strange period for at least a few months as I recall). For awhile you could switch back every time you logged in, manually, to a chronological news feed. Instagram was one of the last holdouts but they switched a year or two ago. Twitter is amazingly bad at this. It takes screenfuls of junk on mobile to get to the chronological stuff.