4 ms·

One of the main things that keeps me using a third-party client (for as long as I can continue using one) is the Home vs.Latest Tweets feature. I NEVER want to

One of the main things that keeps me using a third-party client (for as long as I can continue using one) is the Home vs.Latest Tweets feature. I NEVER want to see the home timeline. I always want a reverse-chronological list of tweets. It is user-hostile to have to continuously select Latest Tweets. I'm sure they see more engagement with the Home timeline, but I just want to be able to flip a switch and never see it.

hanoz 7y ago
Search results in reverse chronological order is Twitter's killer feature but, bafflingly, it seems like they've been going out of thier way to prevent that for years now, especially on mobile. Why? Also, if there's any Android app which lets you do that without having a Twitter account, I'd love to know about it. I used to use a nice little app called SearchBird for this, but it's disappeared and I can't find a replacement.
- losteric 7y ago
  Either hard to efficiently implement at scale, or they want users to forget about reverse chronological ordering in hopes of monetizing feed rank
  - ssalka 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's easier to sort by -timestamp than to run a complex ranking model across all recent tweets (which would have to be windowed by timestamp anyway), and then sort by the output of that. Seems to me like they are going out of their way to force their "top tweets" algorithm on users.
    - losteric 7y ago
      It's a global platform with billions of users, with many users follow hundreds of people, some users followed by millions, huge volumes of media tweets, broad distribution of posting frequency... even with those basic scaling concerns, I don't see how consistent reverse chronology could be implemented as naively as "yo just sort by -timestamp". I would bet "top tweets" improves engagement with the passive consumption audience while saving money by abandoning consistency and improving caching.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  > Search results in reverse chronological order is Twitter's killer feature but, bafflingly, it seems like they've been going out of thier way to prevent that for years now, especially on mobile. Why? The engagement metrics have got to be better with Home. It makes sense, since the whole idea of an algorithmic timeline is to take the stuff the company knows is getting a reaction and feed it to more people. Personally I think this is a great example of how engagement metrics mislead companies. The numbers go up, but it fundamentally changes the nature of the experience. When you're on a reverse-chron timeline you have a sense of people's lives in real time and can have conversations. You only see people you have chosen to follow, so you recognize people and get a sense of their personality. A lot of the content is fairly banal, which gives an (accurate) sense that life for most people is kind of calm and mildly interesting. When you're on an algorithmic timeline, you're seeing content that is really likely to get a reaction--that usually means it has a lot of emotion tied up in it: outrage, anger, sadness, humor, etc. But it's also content that is old and choked with replies. So you can't have a normal conversation around it; there are too many people acting too emotionally. And you're seeing content from more people you don't follow--Twitter's Home timeline brings in a higher percentage of tweets that your follows have liked or replied to. So if your timeline is filled with this kind of content, it creates the (inaccurate) impression that life is full of really extreme moments and amped-up strangers! I can almost always tell when Twitter has switched me back to home. Suddenly I realize I'm feeling more angry, and the numbers on most of the tweets are bigger. I also see more tweets from people I don't recognize. It's like opening my kitchen door and suddenly finding a loud restaurant with spicy food in my house.
- radicaldreamer 7y ago
  Twitter doesn't currently have the stack to scale realtime reverse chron search... there was a spec doc years ago where each timeline would just be a search query on a pool of tweets but that architecture never got built. I'm sure if Twitter was a product which came out of Google's culture, it would've worked that way.
rolltiide 7y ago
It has more engagement because people can't find what they are looking for. They should have ignored the A/B test results, but investors give them money not to!
jpindar 7y ago
There's tweetdeck.twitter.com, which is in chronological order, and gives you separate Home (posts by people you follow) vs Activity (other things related to people you follow) columns, as well as other configurable columns for notifications, searches etc.

hanoz 7y ago

Search results in reverse chronological order is Twitter's killer feature but, bafflingly, it seems like they've been going out of thier way to prevent that for years now, especially on mobile. Why? Also, if there's any Android app which lets you do that without having a Twitter account, I'd love to know about it. I used to use a nice little app called SearchBird for this, but it's disappeared and I can't find a replacement.

losteric 7y ago
Either hard to efficiently implement at scale, or they want users to forget about reverse chronological ordering in hopes of monetizing feed rank
- ssalka 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's easier to sort by -timestamp than to run a complex ranking model across all recent tweets (which would have to be windowed by timestamp anyway), and then sort by the output of that. Seems to me like they are going out of their way to force their "top tweets" algorithm on users.
  - losteric 7y ago
    It's a global platform with billions of users, with many users follow hundreds of people, some users followed by millions, huge volumes of media tweets, broad distribution of posting frequency... even with those basic scaling concerns, I don't see how consistent reverse chronology could be implemented as naively as "yo just sort by -timestamp". I would bet "top tweets" improves engagement with the passive consumption audience while saving money by abandoning consistency and improving caching.
snowwrestler 7y ago
> Search results in reverse chronological order is Twitter's killer feature but, bafflingly, it seems like they've been going out of thier way to prevent that for years now, especially on mobile. Why? The engagement metrics have got to be better with Home. It makes sense, since the whole idea of an algorithmic timeline is to take the stuff the company knows is getting a reaction and feed it to more people. Personally I think this is a great example of how engagement metrics mislead companies. The numbers go up, but it fundamentally changes the nature of the experience. When you're on a reverse-chron timeline you have a sense of people's lives in real time and can have conversations. You only see people you have chosen to follow, so you recognize people and get a sense of their personality. A lot of the content is fairly banal, which gives an (accurate) sense that life for most people is kind of calm and mildly interesting. When you're on an algorithmic timeline, you're seeing content that is really likely to get a reaction--that usually means it has a lot of emotion tied up in it: outrage, anger, sadness, humor, etc. But it's also content that is old and choked with replies. So you can't have a normal conversation around it; there are too many people acting too emotionally. And you're seeing content from more people you don't follow--Twitter's Home timeline brings in a higher percentage of tweets that your follows have liked or replied to. So if your timeline is filled with this kind of content, it creates the (inaccurate) impression that life is full of really extreme moments and amped-up strangers! I can almost always tell when Twitter has switched me back to home. Suddenly I realize I'm feeling more angry, and the numbers on most of the tweets are bigger. I also see more tweets from people I don't recognize. It's like opening my kitchen door and suddenly finding a loud restaurant with spicy food in my house.
radicaldreamer 7y ago
Twitter doesn't currently have the stack to scale realtime reverse chron search... there was a spec doc years ago where each timeline would just be a search query on a pool of tweets but that architecture never got built. I'm sure if Twitter was a product which came out of Google's culture, it would've worked that way.

rolltiide 7y ago

It has more engagement because people can't find what they are looking for. They should have ignored the A/B test results, but investors give them money not to!

jpindar 7y ago

There's tweetdeck.twitter.com, which is in chronological order, and gives you separate Home (posts by people you follow) vs Activity (other things related to people you follow) columns, as well as other configurable columns for notifications, searches etc.