6 ms·
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 algorith
by 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".
- cycrutchfield 8y agoI guarantee Twitter’s data scientists are using more than just “amount the user is clicking” to decide whether a UI or ranking change is beneficial.
- doktrin 8y agoit's hilarious that your main defense of twitter's design decisions is an appeal to twitter's own authority. "twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good, otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!" case closed my circular dude
- cycrutchfield 8y agoIt's hilarious that you think Twitter has not tested chronologically-ordered UIs.
- doktrin 8y agoYou could apply this reasoning to literally anything, because every organisation / nation state / what have you has at some point and in some form considered the consequences of their actions. History shows that internal evaluation is an imperfect science. I suspect you know this and only reserve this extremely circular reasoning for cases which you already agree with. It would be easier to admit you've already formed an opinion and don't care to change it under any circumstance, rather than weakly appeal to Twitter's own authority to justify their actions.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoIt is not just an appeal to Twitter’s authority. It’s an informed opinion based off working in a similar field and conversing with others in this field. So unless you can come up with some concrete data supporting your points, instead of just attacking mine, you are unlikely to change my opinion.
- blotter_paper 8y agoI think something like this circular logic is actually useful, and in some sense true. It might better phrased as "companies which usually make bad financial decisions die, so the decisions of a company which hasn't died are probably financially beneficial." Further qualifiers could be added to account for longevity of a company (we might put more faith in a company which has spent longer not dying), earning reports, and the fact that a good decision isn't necessarily beneficial (just probabilistically so given available knowledge), but the basic reasoning seems valid.
- clusmore 8y agoIf the feed shows me a pseudo-random sample of recent tweets, and each time I refresh I get a slightly different view, of course I'm going to keep refreshing to see if there's anything new or anything that I haven't been shown yet. But most of the time, I just keep seeing the same thing over and over. Imagine if your email client did this.
- p1necone 8y ago"User engagement" is a euphemism for "eyes on screen for as long as possible" and is a good metric for selling ads (the best one really). It's not a very good metric for measuring actual usefulness to users at all though. We need a business model for social media where incentives for companies and their users actually line up.
- kolbe 8y agoNonprofit? A service that does what you likely desire would cost in the eight digits a year to provide for the whole world.
- hannasanarion 8y agoWikipedia gets along just fine. "nonprofit" is not code for "zero revenue"
- billmalarky 8y agoWikipedia's costs are extremely small relative the service usage. They don't have a lot of active development (relatively), and they don't need a ton of expensive infrastructure (relatively). Twitter's annual operating costs are in the $2+ billions. Wikipedia's are in the ~$60 millions. Not to say a non-profit twitter couldn't exist - this just feels like an unfair comparison. Just because two services are popular tech services doesn't mean they are apples to apples to operate.
- p1necone 8y agoWe have an example of a service similar to twitter that's effectively free to run due to it's distributed nature in Mastodon/ActivityPub. Being financially sustainable without having to resort to dark patterns could just be an engineering question.
- _jal 8y agoI've always asserted that Twitter should have been a protocol, not a startup.
- doktrin 8y ago“User engagement” on social media platforms in 2019 is a proxy for “triggering users emotional responses and luring them into internet arguments” Min maxed “user engagement” is almost certainly a net negative for society at large
- dane-pgp 8y ago> “triggering users emotional responses and luring them into internet arguments” Oh yeah?! Well... YOU'RE an internet argument!
- JohnFen 8y ago"More engaging" does not automatically equal "better for users" or "what most users want".
- cycrutchfield 8y agoIt correlates with what users want better than what a handful of HN professional contrarians think they want.
- JohnFen 8y agoI'm not so sure about that.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoWhat a contrarian thing to say.