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> He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it

• AimForTheBushes 8y ago
  No matter how many times I click "Show less of this" it keeps coming back.
  • richmarr 8y ago
    Anyone who's in a position to use Tweetdeck instead of Twitter's web UI will find a free, Twitter-maintained, product with no annoying algorithms and no advertising. It's the version of Twitter targeted at newsrooms, etc. I assume a lot of people already know and have reasons why they don't... but likely not everyone here has tried it so it may be worth repeating. https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
    • gr2020 8y ago
      This has evolved quite a bit since I last tried it - thanks for the reminder!
    • robrtsql 8y ago
      Wow--this exists? I had heard of Tweetdeck, but I assumed that it was a third-party client which provided a better experience and was therefore at odds with Twitter's interests. You're telling me that, not only is Twitter okay with it, but that they built it?
      • erentz 8y ago
        > but that they built it? It was independent then Twitter bought it.
        • udwum 8y ago
          The original TweetDeck was an Adobe AIR application. Twitter bought it, and then rewrote it as a website. So it could be argued that they built it. There were alternatives before such as Seesmic, no idea how they work now, if they still do.
    • shambolicfroli 8y ago
      It says I have messages, but I don't seem to have figured out how to view them.
      • jpindar 8y ago
        Click the + and add a "notification" column.
• wolco 8y ago
  It's both for me at once. I want to see a specific topic and only 5 people's tweets around it. I rarely search but isn't that what hashtags solve? I think changes could be good but history says it will be worse.
  • munk-a 8y ago
    _Maybe_ if they removed all their weird gating and order logic and presented tweets as a list of time ordered events that match the hashtag you're searching for (including user sources) and have another tab for tweets people you're following have retweeted and for tweets in your subject that were popular then they'd fix it... Basically if they actually let users see the data they are holding onto.
• jkchu 8y ago
  Honestly, if the relevant content they showed be was actually relevant and interesting, I wouldn't mind at all. That is a big "if" though.
  • SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Even IF it was relevant sometimes/mosttimes/alltimes... Why would you ever allow someone else to choose what you see? Do you not realize the massive avenue for abuse? How about come election time and the impossible scenario where your "curators" don't agree with your opinions? Google, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit are already creating/supporting bubbles. How would you know if you are in one?
• baggy_trough 8y ago
  Algorithmic feeds are, in all cases, Satan's handiwork. What I want is to see posts from the individuals I have selected, interleaved in chronological order, with no tampering.
  • allenu 8y ago
    It's frustrating that this is the general trend today. I was using the Reddit app the other day and pruning my list of subreddits to reduce distraction when I'm in the app. Of course the app will still insert suggested subreddits in my feed. And then there are the streaming services that recommend (and auto-play) shows and movies to you. Usually I just want to just use a service to consume specific things and then move onto some other activity, but each one is aware of the attention economy and trying to keep me in for as long as possible.
  • azhenley 8y ago
    I agree. As soon as there is any tampering of what information is being displayed, users have a difficult time understanding why they are seeing it and ultimately find it less enjoyable to use. Research keeps showing that for users to "trust" software then they need to have an understanding of why something is being presented to them. It is one of the biggest barriers with recommendation systems.
  • cycrutchfield 8y ago
    If that maximized user engagement, then that is the UI they would present. The fact that they don't do that should tell you that their tests have shown algorithmic feeds are more engaging for users.
    • teraflop 8y ago
      "User engagement" is not a single, well-defined, easily measurable thing. For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive result, you'll never see that. But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that probably gets counted as "engagement".
• Bokanovsky 8y ago
  What I really dislike is the spam in the notifications section. If someone likes my tweet, replies to it or retweets it, that's relevant. I don't however want to see a notification for something Tweeter deems interesting under other people you follow liked/retweed this as a notification.
  • jeffwass 8y ago
    Agreed. What really clogs up my notifications is when other people “like” a post I’m mentioned in. You get a few ‘runaway’ threads that pull on a few dozen people and every like becomes its own notification. A dozen people each liking a dozen tweets on the thread, the notification timeline becomes absolutely useless. Let me mute all likes (potentially keeping likes only for my own tweets).
  • ricefield 8y ago
    Might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually really like this feature. I'm usually not able to get to everything, so it's great to know when something important or interesting got tweeted and I know to check it out. That notification was actually what slowly made me an active Twitter user, because they kept surfacing me interesting content and giving me a reason to come back and it became a gateway for me to discover other great content on Twitter
    • BartBoch 8y ago
      Then make it an opt-in. Companies should use the more "opt-in" method. Bundle it under "experimental" or "advanced features" in an easy to use page with a very clear explanation of what each feature does.
      • hotpockets 8y ago
        But what if most people like it? I have to say I think it makes a lot of sense. If a high number of people I follow like something, you might want to show it to me too.
• jklinger410 8y ago
  He's lost in the advertising metrics sauce.
• DC-3 8y ago
  This would suit me, actually. I use twitter almost exclusively to follow motor racing journalists. However, because of this, I have to dig through the same journalist's opinions on Brexit, FIFA, or Game of Thrones. It would suit me much better to be able to follow 'motorsport' as a topic instead of specific people.
  • your-nanny 8y ago
    aren't there tags already?
• bhargav 8y ago
  During the Joe Rogan podcast, he mentioned that what they are trying to attempt to give people the "other side" of the story rather than promoting creation of echo chambers.
  • walshemj 8y ago
    Ah like Farage monopolising BBCQT - no thank you.
    • meowface 8y ago
      I think Farage is a moron and I couldn't disagree with him more, but what a disappointingly closed-minded view you have. That view is one of the worst problems of Twitter, in my opinion. I think Dorsey is trying to blow smoke up our ass on the other issues, because their core business is advertising no matter what he says, but I actually believe him on this and think it's one of the few really good things he's sincerely trying to do (though I doubt he'll succeed, unfortunately). Echo chambers are poison to good discourse, democracy, philosophy, humanism, and humanity in general. I strongly believe Brexit is monumentally and egregiously terrible, a result of some of our worst and most base instincts in many cases, but if you think Brexit backers don't deserve a fair seat at the discourse table, don't be surprised when that accomplishes the polar opposite of your desired goals.
      • walshemj 8y ago
        Knowing what "Farage" is does not mean I wont debate properly with other political views. Farage is not a moron he is dangerous nationalist stirring up violence for personal gain. Just as the "crank" end of the labour party has its own dangerous individuals.
  • astrodust 8y ago
    "Here we have a climatologist, and for balance, someone who believes the Earth is a computer simulation, and another who is certain it's flat and was created by the Illuminati who are alien lizards."
• SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Don't worry kid, we'll tell you what you want to see!
• Eric_WVGG 8y ago
  He's also making the mistake of thinking that my interests are what @thisdude and @thatchick are talking about. My interests are @thisdude and @thatchick. That's why it's called "social."
• fivre 8y ago
  I'm doubtful of whatever sort of nonsense philosophical rationalization Dorsey comes up regarding how he thinks users should use, and should want to use the service. It's likely this: > And while Dorsey said he’s less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing “what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it,” Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it’s a public company, with a business model based on advertising. I'm fairly certain that Anderson's expectation here is probably true, and that Dorsey is at best disconnected from the reality of how Twitter's business operates if he's not being outright disingenuous. The number of ads shown increases with the amount of time spent using the service, and assuming there is some business unit within Twitter tasked with increasing revenue, that business unit will likely attempt to increase time spent using the service. Inserting this extra garbage and preventing users from disabling it serves that purpose because it makes it more difficult to tell when you've reached posts you've already read and forces you to scroll longer to reach them.
• p1necone 8y ago
  As far as I can tell the real motivation for so many feed based services doing this is just that if you stick enough irrelevant non ad shit in users feeds the ads will blend in better. None of these companies will ever publicly admit that that's the intention though.
• sanikos 8y ago
  I must be one of the few people who actually enjoy the "best" timeline. I don't follow too many people so it just fills up my timeline with a little more stuff, otherwise it would be rather stale.
• kevin_b_er 8y ago
  Also where those interests are determined by what advertisers pay the most.
• rodgerd 8y ago
  > Has anybody ever been happy with Twitter's attempts to force content from non-followed users into the feed? Judging by the amount of alt-right nonsense that gets promoted to me despite my complete disinterest I'd say they're fucking delighted.
• chamakits 8y ago
  Although I seem to be in the minority, yeah, I've been pretty happy with the recommendations they give me recently. It didn't begin like this, but I'd say it's there now. But I use Twitter not as a social tool, but as a tool to follow things and artists I'm interested in. For example, I follow lots of lowpoly, pixelart and indy-dev accounts. With some frequency I get in my feed someone that is followed by those accounts, or something one of those accounts liked. It tends to be something also related to that community (pixelart artists follow other pixelart artists, etc) so I like the post. Sometimes I check the account, see their feed, and end up following it. I'm not sure if that's how most others use twitter, but that's how I use it mostly, and it's worked out pretty well.
• markdog12 8y ago
  I recently created a Twitter account, mostly as an experiment. I just followed some programmers, stuck to programming content. Immediately and every day after, I was constantly being displayed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, etc. Not a single politician or voice not on the left. Considering how powerful Twitter has become, this is troubling. I know this is just one anecdote, wondering what the rest of HN sees...
  • tropo 8y ago
    This is what you see even if you follow nothing or if you only follow stuff clearly associated with the right. When you follow stuff associated with the right, it often gets unfollowed. This was very noticeable with the movie Unplanned. Basically you couldn't follow it. If you start off a new account by following only politicians on the right, you are highly likely to get your account banned.
  • platz 8y ago
    > just followed some programmers Well now you know why you're seeing what you're seeing. Are programmers supposed to be some apolitical hyper-rational cohort?
    • markdog12 8y ago
      I did wait 2 weeks without following anyone, just searched for programming languages and such. But yes, I wondered that as well.
    • pluma 8y ago
      I used to be annoyed about how a lot of the programmers I followed on Twitter would tweet about politics and feminism. Then I talked to some people who were on the receiving end of the kind of programmers that don't care about those things, groan when they hear words like "feminism", "intersectionality" or "diversity" and instead believe in "meritocracy" and "rationality". Now I'm one of those programmers who tweet about politics and feminism. Sometimes you need to be confronted with the pain you've been complicit to in order to figure out why the people around you all seem to disagree with you and make such a fuss about stuff you don't care about.
• SllX 8y ago
  Let me quote the full paragraph: >> In his view, that means rethinking how Twitter incentivizes user behavior. He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it — rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn. What he is describing sounds a lot closer to reddit than it does to Twitter today. I am not usually a Twitter user, and I’ve been giving it another go. The same basic design flaw is still present though: when I follow people, I’m following people, and I might be following an individual for a particular topic they are typically insightful on, but I’m also getting their sports and politics at the same time. Contrast with reddit where the communities are topic centric and moderated according to their own rules, and /r/all can be safely disregarded if you’re just browsing. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think Jack Dorsey is planning to ape reddit’s design anytime soon, but I think a move in the direction to interest—based networks would be an improvement on their current design and think we should see what it this actually entails before we cast judgement. That said, as largely a Twitter-outsider, I respect if you disagree. Personally, I think this move would make the service more valuable to someone like me, but I could also see why such changes wouldn’t be for long time users who are used to the way things are.
  • dorfsmay 8y ago
    Sounds a lot closer? It's exactly reddit. I configured twitter to keep tweets in chronological order and not to filter anything, so I only see tweets from accounts I follow, and I see all their tweets, and see them in chron. order. What he wants to do is copy reddit. I can't see what they could add to reddit, but they'd completely lose what twitter is good at (following people).
    • blotter_paper 8y ago
      > It's exactly reddit. That's ridiculous. Is topic vs author the only metric we use to categorize social media? What about thread flatness, delegation of curation/censorship and styling, quantitative and qualitative distinctions about how feeds are tailored to users, etc.? I can think of many distinctions between the two despite rarely using either.
• blahblahblogger 8y ago
  > He suggested that the service works best as an “interest-based network,” where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it Not to mention Jack/Twitter's co-founder Evan Williams has a company called Medium that literally does just that.
• encoderer 8y ago
  I, personally, love the interest based groupings of tweets below the trending topics on the search tab. That said, I like following people because one of my interests is people.
• shanev 8y ago
  I think it's impossible to re-think Twitter and satisfy everyone. I completely switched who I follow (using Lists) twice already based on my interest changes in technology. First Rails, then iOS, now "crypto". I was early enough in the first two communities to know who the movers and shakers were. However it took me a while to find who is worth following in "Crypto Twitter". So I personally welcome any attempts to show me relevant content from folks I don't follow yet in the field.