17 ms·

Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

357 points by Yaina 5y ago

radley 5y ago
Not exactly an extreme solution: on macOS you can use Time Machine to restore Twitter to a version that's only chronological. You have to grab the Sept 11 2021 release. The Home feed was added in late October as a trojan horse.
rahidz 5y ago
Just bookmark this: https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Areplies&src=saved_search_click&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Are... As a bonus, no ads.
EastSmith 5y ago
These algorithmic news are optimized for user retention and engagment, rather then the news itself, so it is esntialy the digital equivalent of nicotine addiction. They simply make you want more and more of the same shit.
Hardik_Shah 5y ago
Twitter is implementing a change that will make it more difficult to view your timeline feed. Twitter began rolling out its algorithmic timeline in 2016 (to much fanfare), and in 2018 introduced the spark icon, which allows you to switch between algorithmic and reverse timeline feeds. To me, the spark seemed like a reasonable way to coexist with the Home and Latest timelines, but with the change announced on Thursday, Twitter appears to be pushing users towards the algorithmic feed. Instagram, on the other hand, is experimenting with reporting the chronological flow of its users.
BeefWellington 5y ago
PSA: Tweetdeck still exists and is the superior way to Twitter IMO: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
- zaphar 5y ago
  This is my daily driver for twitter. I would have stopped using Twitter a long time ago if this wasn't here.
meesterdude 5y ago
Everytime they mess with my feed, I get closer to closing my account; especially as they exert more and more control. all I want is to follow specific people and see their tweets in chronological order. I don't want it shuffled, i don't care what they've liked, I don't care what who follows them is tweeting (if I did, i would be following them). Also, it's creepy there is no "disable" or "stop" functionality. Everything is "See less often". No, I don't want to see it EVER.
vero2 5y ago
Use nitter.net and just use nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3
ubermonkey 5y ago
I use a third-party client. I never see this timeline chicanery at all. (Tweetbot is my choice, fwiw.)
- dawnerd 5y ago
  I want to like Tweetbot, but ever since Twitter made those API changes it just hasn’t been the same.
  - neallindsay 5y ago
    Since then, Twitter has made some more third-party-client-friendly changes. You might want to check out Tweetbot again. (For instance, voting on polls is still official-client-only, but you can see polls in Tweetbot and it gives you a link to the first-party client so you can vote.)
Philadelphia 5y ago
This may be the motivation I need to permanently delete Twitter. I’ve deleted it before when they’ve played with this stuff, because I don’t want to use an app I have to fight with. I was going through Apple News last night, and that looks like it might be a decent replacement for me.
nightski 5y ago
Time to re-evaluate the usefulness of Twitter. Might just be time to close my account. I quit Facebook last year and honestly haven't even missed it a little. It's hard making the leap, but these companies are determined to make it easier :)
mdoms 5y ago
I have been using Twitter for 13 years and it's quite clear why they are pushing this so hard - because people aren't tweeting anymore. I follow around 400 accounts, constantly adding and removing accounts. My chronological feed used to be a steady stream of content that I couldn't keep up with. Nowadays I can go for hours without a new tweet appearing in my feed. If I go to the algorithmic feed (or when Twitter randomly sends me back there) there's a huge unending stream of content, but if you pay attention to the dates on the tweets, lots of them are 4+ days old. Twitter is a dying platform and the algorithmic feed has two goals. First and foremost it's to keep you scrolling. But secondly it's to mask just how dead the platform is.
sprkwd 5y ago
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com https://tweetdeck.twitter.com no ads. chronological. none of this 'trending' nonsense in the sidebar. there is no sidebar. it's wonderful.
anizan 5y ago
Social startups like to optimize on this quote from Godfather. "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"
te_chris 5y ago
Yet another move that makes me glad I closed my account
MBCook 5y ago
I really like Twitter, I follow a lot of great people and discover a lot of great things on it. But I don’t understand how anyone uses their website or the official client. If it wasn’t for a third-party client I think I’d give up pretty fast.
- hanklazard 5y ago
  Which third party client do you recommend?
  - amatecha 5y ago
    on iOS, TweetBot is excellent. It has been the best iOS client (IMO) for years.
  - mttjj 5y ago
    Tweetbot if you’re on iOS. I’ve used it for probably close to a decade and nothing compares IMO. Always chronological timeline, no ads whatsoever, filters, mutes, etc. It’s just great. They recently moved to a subscription model (I know, I know) but it’s only like $5/year and way worth it. In the past, major versions were usually a $10-$20 upgrade price. Ever since they moved to this model the rate of updates and new features has really ramped up, too.
    - MBCook 5y ago
      Yep, that’s what I’ve been using since the day I joined Twitter. I literally never use the site except to sign up and adjust account settings (like 2FA).
  - robryan 5y ago
    Harpy on Android is pretty solid. Nice UI and loads fast. I seem to have some issues viewing threads when navigating to them from a retweet but I may just be missing something.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Twitterrific is nice on iOS.
IRP 5y ago
I deeply hate the algorithmic (Home) version. It seems to totally hide the tweets of people who don't have a certain ranking. What's the point of following someone's account if Tweeter doesn't even show me what they are posting?
- happytiger 5y ago
  This is exactly why I’ve more or less stopped using it. Twitter seems to have become not useful.
  - Thlom 5y ago
    I only read Twitter through Tweetbot on my phone and have been doing so for like forever. I get a reversed chronological timeline, no ads and no recommendations. I hear people talk about how useless Twitter has become, but for me Twitter has been more or less the same since 2006.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who likes the "algorithmic" feed. In theory I follow few enough people to be able to sit down and read every tweet - I rarely want to. The magical "algorithm" seems to do a reasonable job of raising tweets with high activity, or tweets from people I often interact with, to the top. This seems entirely reasonable to me, and if I want to see the rest, I can just keep scrolling. Perhaps it is more of a problem if you follow hundreds of people. But I don't do that, and if I did, I'd never be able to read everything anyway.
- jsnell 5y ago
  The problem isn't with reordering the timeline. It's that the algorithmic timeline will insert all kinds of total garbage posted by people I don't follow into the timeline. The real timeline is easy to curate. Just follow people who post interesting things, then unfollow people who turn out to tweet too much about things you have no interest in. The algorithmic timeline makes that impossible.
  - thrdbndndn 5y ago
    I actually like these recommendations. Then again I mainly use Twitter to look for arts, so it's less important that a tweet is posted by someone I follow or not.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I feel like I'm the only person in the world who likes the "algorithmic" feed. You're not alone. I've switched back and forth but the algorithm wins every time for me. For me, the biggest downside of the chronological feed is that it is dominated by people who Tweet the most, which is an obvious outcome of pure chronological ordering. The algorithmic feed seems to do a good job of showing me Tweets from people I've interacted with or whose Tweets I've liked. It's good at surfacing Tweets from people I follow who rarely Tweet while effectively rate-limiting the Tweets from the excessive Tweeters that I follow. This is a strange article because Twitter is still giving the chronological fans what they want. I have no doubt that chronological feed is a rarely used feature and in 2022 it's guaranteed that Twitter has analytics to back up this decision.
ajpkco 5y ago
They should have a separate tab for the two of them like YouTube has, I like being able to move quickly between the algorithmic recommended feed and the “subscribed to” one.
- leodriesch 5y ago
  This is exactly what this update brought, isn’t it? The app now has a tab bar on top with Home and Latest Tweets.
extr 5y ago
Part of the reason twitter is so great is that reading posts chronologically gives you a feeling of connection and immediacy in communication. I like reading posts from 5 seconds ago, conversations only yet halfway through, absolute bleeding edge breaking news, it's unique among social media platforms in this regard and that makes it feel very alive. But I don't get that from the algorithm, my timeline turns into more of a constantly rotating greatest hits reel of posts in my corner of the network graph. That's cool, ha ha very funny meme. But it doesn't feel "alive" then, it feels like FB/IG/Tiktok. Which kind of ruins the point of why I enjoy twitter in the first place.
nkozyra 5y ago
They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline for ... well, forever. As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline. But I can't fathom why seemingly no effort has gone into monetizing a chronological timeline. Why is it's foregone conclusion that it won't work with advertising the way the algorithmic was works?
- flenserboy 5y ago
  You're assuming that Twitter is a business that is run like a business and not something else.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  None of those motivations seem to make much sense. I’d bet on simple negligence: only a tiny minority insists on the chronological timeline and it’s therefore acceptable to annoy them from time to time.
- slimsag 5y ago
  I don't think there's any issue monetizing a chronological timeline. The issue for them I imagine is retention: with chronological, it's likely that when you visit Twitter the first few messages you see are not interesting and you leave. But if they put a tweet that's popular among your social group in front of you? Odds are that's interesting to you and you stick around a bit longer. I dislike that, to be clear, but I imagine this is the human behavior for >90% of people.
  - eatsyourtacos 5y ago
    Which is what pissed me off the most about TikTok for the brief period I used it. They would just show me random shit basically irregardless of date.. and that's not at all what I wanted. I found it to be an new source- of sorts. I'm not saying a good one, but at least it was somewhat interesting to may see peoples perspective on some topic. But what I found is it would just show me stuff that could be months old, days old etc instead of prioritizing like.. top day things. I haven't used it during the russia/ukraine time.. but I can't imagine how wildly inaccurate of a picture you would get if you are viewing stuff completely out of date order. Yeah they put the date on the video.. but that doesn't really help, everything is still all over the place. For all Reddit's faults- I can at least go there, take a look at some of the top headlines in some subreddits.. and know if I see something it's recent unless I am looking otherwise.
hirundo 5y ago
I feel like a smuggler. I closed my Twitter account due to such shenanigans, and now read my favorite tweeters via Nitter RSS feeds. None of the various Twitter bovine excrement comes along for the ride, just the words of the people I intend to follow, in the order posted. No ads, no trending topics, no shocking takes from a friend of a friend of a friend. And for me the read-only nature of this arrangement is a bonus feature. So it's probably just a matter of time before this route is plugged.
- abnercoimbre 5y ago
  What do you mean plugged? Twitter will find a way to shut down Nitter?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tim-- 5y ago
    It wouldn't be too hard. Nitter is using a few unofficial APIs from Twitter.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      As far as I know, Nitter reverse-engineers and uses the same API that their official web frontend uses. So while it can be made difficult and turned into a game of cat & mouse, it can't be "shut down" per se without also shutting down their own UI.
amatecha 5y ago
If you want "Twitter" without ads, algorithmic feed manipulated by marketing, actual moderation, and actual community, I suggest joining a Mastodon[0] instance (and you probably already know people who are on the platform, making it easier to choose which instance ;)). It's kinda like using Twitter in 2007, but with way more features. For example, selective permissions per-"toot" ("followers only", or "unlisted" which makes it not show up on the public timeline, but still visible on your profile or to followers), content warning on toots (like a spoiler warning), full image description support, much longer posts... Personally I'm closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon. Many in my social circle have already done so. Oh, while I'm at it: if you want to view Twitter posts without having a Twitter account (or just don't want to see ads and trending crap), check out Nitter[1]. Alternative front-end. It also has minimal JS and is far more resource-efficient (viewing my profile loaded 1.56mb of resources on Nitter, compared to 9.2mb on Twitter) [0] https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [1] https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/
- YaBomm 5y ago
- cpach 5y ago
  “Personally I’m closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon.” I did this and I don’t regret it.
- TeddyDD 5y ago
  This. I'm still on Twitter for lol content, but I can dump it at any moment. Mastodon is great.
- ptato 5y ago
  I don't know anyone who uses Mastodon, and whenever I've tried it every instance seems barren. I would love to ditch Twitter though.
- sdrinf 5y ago
  Last year, I throw some significant amount of time, energy, and dev focus to get into this; on the basis that I _wanted_ Mastodon to be a successful thing. To be specific, I've first spent around 2 weeks for "searching"/browsing (there's no search, only tags :/ ), seeking out acquaintances, and looking for topics/servers that would tickle my curiosity/insight senses. There were none for me. So, given that mastodon is large, and federated, surely the problem is with me right? So, I said fuck it, let's break out the API. I wrote a scraper, seeded with a few least-bad people's profile, programmed it to pull the last ~32 toots & add all connections of the user to scrape breadth-first to get a wide array of perspectives. ~150 servers & 50,000 toots. I then took my general keyword list (~150 items, representing majority of my interests in both layman and technical terms) that I use to evaluate social networks, and search engines, and crunched through the toots. Results: deep technical terms have accidental hits, generally used either in different context; or scratching almost none of the surface. Wide terms generally pull very low signal, from the general vicinity of conspiracy theories/how bad twitter is/crypto/mastodon is great. I'd really really would prefer to actually use Mastodon, but 1, the features they offer optimizes against it's own usage (lack of search, lack of discoverability; you can call this positive change, but again, it optimizes against onboarding & finding interesting stuff) 2, because it's federated, there's no-one dedicated to acquiring people who have better use of their time, and 3, the people who are in there, do not, currently, would lead me to level up in directions I care about. Mastodon represents a set of preferences, and I'm happy for you that it seems to be aligning with yours; it does not aligns with mine, is all I'm saying.
scim-knox-twox 5y ago
I've stopped using Facebook since they messed up timeline several years ago (even manually selecting “Newest posts” started to do… nothing).
- krater23 5y ago
  I know what you mean. The algorithm killed Facebook for me.
jra101 5y ago
Thankful that Tweetdeck still works and has never tried to switch me to a non-chronological feed.
bmlzootown 5y ago
GoodTwitter2[0] is the only reason that I still use the web version anymore. I can handle the mobile interface on a mobile device, but making the desktop experience mobile-themed was the straw that almost broke the camel's back. GoodTwitter2 mostly fixes that, thankfully. The userscript also fixes the reverse-chronological issue. There's literally a setting that enables one to force "Latest Tweets First" mode, so it'll switch back to the "latest" feed whenever Twitter has decided that you should be viewing their "home" feed instead. [0] https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2 https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  Do you know how to access GT2 settings? I can't seem to find it after installing the script and confirming it works.
  - bmlzootown 5y ago
    It should be accessible from the normal settings. Click on your profile avatar, settings and privacy, GoodTwitter2.
    - malwarebytess 5y ago
      Yeah, it's blank for me unfortunately. I think I'm experiencing a bug like this one here: https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2/issues/33 https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2/issues/33 i'll look into it
- syl_sau 5y ago
  May I suggest the FF extension Minimal Theme[0] by Thomas Wang, which simplifies the UI by removing those enormous blobs of texts everywhere and also by hiding the "trends" panel. Very good addition: it can also hide engagement counts (replies, RTs and likes), so you can scroll sanely without feeling obliged to like a stupid tweet just because it has 100 likes already. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimaltwitter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimaltwitte...
insin 5y ago
Tweak New Twitter [0] can automatically keep you on Latest Tweets and hide the new timeline tabs, even if Latest Tweets is "unpinned" [1] (as long as the implementation hasn't changed significantly since the last A/B test they did of timeline tabs on web) [0] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter [1] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/issues/78 https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/issues/78
- _Microft 5y ago
  I can recommend "Tweet New Twitter" too. It allows users fine-grained control of Twitter's features (algorithmic content, retweets, UI changes and more). The only small criticism that I have is that there is no button or keyboard shortcut to quickly disable it in the case that I actually need one of the disabled features). For that you can quickly bring up Firefox' addons dialog via Ctrl+Shift+A though, to disable the addon completely.
molach 5y ago
I use tweetbot tweetdeck and twidere
null_object 5y ago
I don’t care what they do so long as they don’t turn off API-access allowing the user to switch to much better alternatives free of their advertising, profiling, and spying crap
ifvictr 5y ago
I have a bookmark of their mobile web app on my phone’s home screen now. Works great as a replacement if you don’t mind losing features like push notifications and the ability to speak in Spaces! It also has the benefit of tweet drafts syncing from your other web browsers.
jwmoz 5y ago
I hate Twitter for all the change they've made-more spam and useless engagement features. I noticed this in testing some time ago, constantly making it hard just to see what I want, not the Algo suggested tweets, other peoples likes, spam etc. Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust. Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube on every video view, and I can't even speak Chinese.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Consider using Mastodon instead. It's the new Twitter which will never get bloated (because it's p2p and FLOSS).
- alperakgun 5y ago
  Twitter stream looks like MSN.com/Yahoo (News) frontpage. It's not social, it's full of suggestions I don't like.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  That sucks! You know, you don't have to see advertisements. And you don't have to log into google. You can subscribe to feeds with RSS.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    Twitter is (was?) for 1:1 discourse and updates, not consuming news or long form content. If you used Twitter like an RSS feed you were doing it wrong
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- joering2 5y ago
  > Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube You are lucky! I obviously share IP at home with my children, but how is my 13 years old daughter getting disgusting commercials (all in Portuguese for some reason??) of "Manscape" products, women's "spray everywhere even there" deodorant, some soap where interracial couple does everything other than THAT under the shower... and few others jaw-droppers I honestly forgot by now. And tons and tons of crypto spam. I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore?? has to be some bot fishing for keywords and nude, if none, then approve.
ricardobeat 5y ago
They’ve made the decision to lay down the algorithm long ago. Mind you, I can absolutely see that activity on Twitter has only been going up recently. Which would be great if 80% of it wasn’t self-promotion, crypto babble and spam, plagiarized content, and LinkedIn style “expert” threads. On top of that, all of the promoted tweets I see are junk content farms. It hasn’t been an ideal place for connecting with friends for a while, and now it’s becoming an absolute shit hole for decent content or professional communities. What will be left?
- zeepzeep 5y ago
  You guys really need to get your twitter feed in order. You realize that they have an option to only show latest tweets of people you follow? Then it's just about unfollowing all crypto spammers and you're good. While my feed isn't free of undesired content, it's far better than any other platform I use, including HN (because the good bits from HN get shared on Twitter).
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    You are commenting on a post that is about Twitter removing the option to see latest tweets by default… Also, the chronological timeline is not ideal once you follow > 100 profiles. One of the issues at hand here is that they removed the “missed” section and replaced with the algorithmic feed. There is no way to catch up with only the most interesting tweets from people you follow, other than scrolling through all of it.
    - zeepzeep 5y ago
      I'm following over 100 and I do not have a hard time, just scroll up from where you left off last time > other than scrolling through all of it. What do you want? Do you want all latest tweets, or do you want AI to generate a list of good ones?
      - ricardobeat 5y ago
        I guess it depends on how prolific your feed is. I don't have 40 minutes to review the entire timeline every day. AI is not inherently evil. Yes, I want to see the most relevant / controversial / liked tweets by people I follow. Most of that doesn't need any complex algorithm in the first place. What I don't want to see are bubble-inducing "recommended" tweets, or tweets liked by someone I follow (isn't that what retweets are for?), or "topics", or "people you should follow". If I wanted an AI-curated feed I'd just go to facebook or read the news.
WA 5y ago
1. Create list 2. Add people 3. Read as reverse chronological feed without ads.
- vero2 5y ago
  https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4 https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4
thiht 5y ago
The word thing is that the « Home » feed is soooo bad. Twitter switched me to the home feed without my knowledge and I was like « wtf this tweet is 2 months old + I’ve already liked it + it’s not even active »… I thought it was a cache issue
Tenoke 5y ago
They might make it harder to choose but props to Twitter for still having the chronological option and allowing access through alternative interfaces like Tweetdeck unlike say Facebook. Also props for letting you to just straight block in the normal way the account behind an ad you see.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nickdothutton 5y ago
Twitter is now deep into the “every new release makes the product worse” stage of life.
- sph 5y ago
  Reddit as well, though it seems to me Twitter tries harder to make itself hated to its power users. I reckon they've decided they've become so indispensable and irreplaceable they can do whatever they want to maximise profit.
fredsted 5y ago
I see a lot of posters saying they don't like the algo feed, but I prefer it. When I launch twitter, I really want to see what's going on, what I've missed and what the current popular posts are. I follow hundreds of accounts, and if I were to go through it all in rev chron order, it would take hours.
- NGRhodes 5y ago
  In theory I would like this feature for discovery, but the signal to noise ratio for me is terrible, I have tried to use it, blocking 20 topics and it's still a poor experience for me. I could well be an outlier for this feature.
blacklight 5y ago
Just use Twitter's lists. I've been using them for a long time. I added to one of my lists only the accounts that I really want to see on my feed (no old school friends, acquaintances, nor random people that some of the accounts I follow just started following: only sources with added value). The result? Open your list, and you'll see all the tweets sorted chronologically, only from the accounts you really care to follow. The quality of the time I spend on Twitter has dramatically increased since this change. No more time wasted scrolling through whatever irrelevant tweets the platform wants me to see. Twitter for me has basically become like an RSS feed aggregator with a curated list of sources to follow, reported in chronological order. And that's exactly what I wanted. Fck their algorithmic sht: I know better than them what I want to read.
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  Myself I hardly ever open the Twitter front page. I get all my Twitter follows in my RSS reader through RSS-bridge, and then it doesn't matter how Twitter sorts them.
  - aceazzameen 5y ago
    This sounds like the way to go. I'll keep this plan in my back pocket if/when the chronological feeds disappear.
- SECProto 5y ago
  Caveat: I immediately block anyone who adds me to a list (it's only happened 3 or 4 times and it seems spammy). And I've seen a number of other accounts with "don't add me to lists" or equivalent in their bio.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    There's a difference between private and public lists. As far as I'm aware, adding someone to a private list does not notify them that they've been added, it just give you a filter and the chronological view of tweets from people you add to the list.
lucumo 5y ago
Ffs. The availability of the chronological timeline is the only reason why Twitter still works for me and Facebook and LinkedIn don't. I keep seeing the same shit on the latter two, despite extensive attempts to train the recommender engine. Facebook just keeps showing me the same posts over and over again. LinkedIn shows different posts, but they are all so cookie cutter similar that they might as well have been the same. And even more insipid, it will do a repeat of network updates at two weeks and four weeks. Nothing says "we got interesting content" more than reruns! I'm soooo looking forward to Twitter being uninteresting repeats as well. > But when I force close and re-open the app when looking at the Latest Tweets column, the Home feed is what Twitter shows first. Great. Choose between keeping the app always-on or having boring shit first.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > LinkedIn shows different posts, but they are all so cookie cutter similar that they might as well have been the same. I fear the cookie-cutter similarity of business communications isn't something LinkedIn will be able to fix. Banality is a borderline essential component of business communications. I absolutely loathe LinkedIn; it's the social network I resent the most.
- DavideNL 5y ago
  > chronological timeline Just use one of the 3th party twitter clients… problem solved. I use “Aviary - for Twitter” on iOS which has no subscription, unlike Tweetbot.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
teekert 5y ago
I think FB stopping with the chronological feed was the point I dropped off (years ago). Every time I'd log in it was different and unpredictable and I couldn't find anything back anymore even though I knew I read something about a month ago. Idk, maybe the algo's order is better for most people, but it doesn't work for me. As for Twitter, I never got on that boat.
igravious 5y ago
I had no idea that clicking on the "sparkle" thingy allowed you to switch from algorithmic to reverse chronological order.
Ambolia 5y ago
Is there any easy way to follow a couple of Twitter accounts in chronological order without having a Twitter account? Nitter is nice to follow individual accounts, but you have to go to each account 1 by 1 rather than create a personal timeline with chronological posts from different accounts.
- timbit42 5y ago
  Use nitter.net and just use nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3
- flas9sd 5y ago
  I use fraidycat (browser addon) for this. You can import/export your follows as html/json/opml too if you want to move. While not necessary, a nitter instance also replaces twitter.com, primarily for the rendering speed. It's funny that alternative frontends became a thing
  - Ambolia 5y ago
    Cool, it's available as an AUR package in Arch Linux too: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fraidycat-git https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fraidycat-git
- vero2 5y ago
  https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4 https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4
- evilsetg 5y ago
  The Fritter app has this capability, if I remember correctly.
lloeki 5y ago
Every time I get to use Twitter outside of Tweetbot I wonder how folks can use the damn thing and get any value out of it, and conversely stop wondering why people say to me "I tried Twitter but I could not understand anything". I guess there must be some (presumably big) audience that likes the algorithm, but for Twitter to derive value for me it must have this element of predictability that the mechanically chronological timeline and properly threaded conversations brings.
bgro 5y ago
I still haven’t figured out how to read twitter conversations / threads and profiles. Everything always seems out of order. Referenced things are just generally missing as well. I don’t think they were deleted but I have no idea.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  The fact that third-party "unroll" services are actually essential is what makes Twitter so laughable. It is, as it has always been, a banal protocol trying to dress up as an impressive product.
- coffeecat 5y ago
  I think this is a fundamental flaw in the platform. Shared context is the key to having productive conversations, and twitter is a massive decontextualization machine. Traditional forums allow messages to be disseminated widely to readers who potentially have no out-of-band context. But they have enough in-band context to enable productive conversations: (1) there's a thread title and an original post which everyone generally reads, (2) all messages in a thread are visible to everyone, and (3) longer messages are supported. Short messages of a sentence or two are insufficient to convey much information without context, but can be very useful with context: "Sure, 6 sounds good". SMS and messaging apps work fine because messages are displayed in the context of a conversation, and dissemination is limited to known recipients who generally have some out-of-band context. But twitter provides little or no in-band context, messages are too short to stand on their own without context, and messages are disseminated to a global user base which has no out-of-band context. You'd expect that to be a recipe for a dumpster fire.
dwighttk 5y ago
Seems like every year Twitter does something I’d hate during Lent. I wonder if their users drop off noticeably and they panic or if they know it is coming.
- leodriesch 5y ago
  I always imagine their user counts are quite low compared to other social media. Where I live I’m quite the outlier for using Twitter, very few people use it. Most that do work in tech. Is that different in other parts of the world? Is Twitter mainstream social media that almost everyone you know has?
  - dwighttk 5y ago
    Almost everyone I know uses text/email as their social network. Probably hear most people talk about faceboook though. I know a few of the people I follow on Twitter but not many that live anywhere near me.
  - krater23 5y ago
    I don't know anyone out of the tech bubble that uses Twitter. Most poeple don't know what it is.
mschuster91 5y ago
Jesus. They should go and fix elementary stuff like search first - try searching "from:@accountname keyword", and it will usually take five to ten attempts until you find that tweet from three years ago - before they introduce shit that the users don't fucking want.

357 points by Yaina 5y ago

Not exactly an extreme solution: on macOS you can use Time Machine to restore Twitter to a version that's only chronological. You have to grab the Sept 11 2021 release. The Home feed was added in late October as a trojan horse.

rahidz 5y ago

Just bookmark this: https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Areplies&src=saved_search_click&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Are... As a bonus, no ads.

EastSmith 5y ago

These algorithmic news are optimized for user retention and engagment, rather then the news itself, so it is esntialy the digital equivalent of nicotine addiction. They simply make you want more and more of the same shit.

Hardik_Shah 5y ago

Twitter is implementing a change that will make it more difficult to view your timeline feed. Twitter began rolling out its algorithmic timeline in 2016 (to much fanfare), and in 2018 introduced the spark icon, which allows you to switch between algorithmic and reverse timeline feeds. To me, the spark seemed like a reasonable way to coexist with the Home and Latest timelines, but with the change announced on Thursday, Twitter appears to be pushing users towards the algorithmic feed. Instagram, on the other hand, is experimenting with reporting the chronological flow of its users.

BeefWellington 5y ago

PSA: Tweetdeck still exists and is the superior way to Twitter IMO: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

zaphar 5y ago
This is my daily driver for twitter. I would have stopped using Twitter a long time ago if this wasn't here.

meesterdude 5y ago

Everytime they mess with my feed, I get closer to closing my account; especially as they exert more and more control. all I want is to follow specific people and see their tweets in chronological order. I don't want it shuffled, i don't care what they've liked, I don't care what who follows them is tweeting (if I did, i would be following them). Also, it's creepy there is no "disable" or "stop" functionality. Everything is "See less often". No, I don't want to see it EVER.

vero2 5y ago

Use nitter.net and just use nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3

ubermonkey 5y ago

I use a third-party client. I never see this timeline chicanery at all. (Tweetbot is my choice, fwiw.)

dawnerd 5y ago
I want to like Tweetbot, but ever since Twitter made those API changes it just hasn’t been the same.
- neallindsay 5y ago
  Since then, Twitter has made some more third-party-client-friendly changes. You might want to check out Tweetbot again. (For instance, voting on polls is still official-client-only, but you can see polls in Tweetbot and it gives you a link to the first-party client so you can vote.)

Philadelphia 5y ago

This may be the motivation I need to permanently delete Twitter. I’ve deleted it before when they’ve played with this stuff, because I don’t want to use an app I have to fight with. I was going through Apple News last night, and that looks like it might be a decent replacement for me.

nightski 5y ago

Time to re-evaluate the usefulness of Twitter. Might just be time to close my account. I quit Facebook last year and honestly haven't even missed it a little. It's hard making the leap, but these companies are determined to make it easier :)

mdoms 5y ago

I have been using Twitter for 13 years and it's quite clear why they are pushing this so hard - because people aren't tweeting anymore. I follow around 400 accounts, constantly adding and removing accounts. My chronological feed used to be a steady stream of content that I couldn't keep up with. Nowadays I can go for hours without a new tweet appearing in my feed. If I go to the algorithmic feed (or when Twitter randomly sends me back there) there's a huge unending stream of content, but if you pay attention to the dates on the tweets, lots of them are 4+ days old. Twitter is a dying platform and the algorithmic feed has two goals. First and foremost it's to keep you scrolling. But secondly it's to mask just how dead the platform is.

sprkwd 5y ago

https://tweetdeck.twitter.com https://tweetdeck.twitter.com no ads. chronological. none of this 'trending' nonsense in the sidebar. there is no sidebar. it's wonderful.

anizan 5y ago

Social startups like to optimize on this quote from Godfather. "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"

te_chris 5y ago

Yet another move that makes me glad I closed my account

MBCook 5y ago

I really like Twitter, I follow a lot of great people and discover a lot of great things on it. But I don’t understand how anyone uses their website or the official client. If it wasn’t for a third-party client I think I’d give up pretty fast.

hanklazard 5y ago
Which third party client do you recommend?
- amatecha 5y ago
  on iOS, TweetBot is excellent. It has been the best iOS client (IMO) for years.
- mttjj 5y ago
  Tweetbot if you’re on iOS. I’ve used it for probably close to a decade and nothing compares IMO. Always chronological timeline, no ads whatsoever, filters, mutes, etc. It’s just great. They recently moved to a subscription model (I know, I know) but it’s only like $5/year and way worth it. In the past, major versions were usually a $10-$20 upgrade price. Ever since they moved to this model the rate of updates and new features has really ramped up, too.
  - MBCook 5y ago
    Yep, that’s what I’ve been using since the day I joined Twitter. I literally never use the site except to sign up and adjust account settings (like 2FA).
- robryan 5y ago
  Harpy on Android is pretty solid. Nice UI and loads fast. I seem to have some issues viewing threads when navigating to them from a retweet but I may just be missing something.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Twitterrific is nice on iOS.

IRP 5y ago

I deeply hate the algorithmic (Home) version. It seems to totally hide the tweets of people who don't have a certain ranking. What's the point of following someone's account if Tweeter doesn't even show me what they are posting?

happytiger 5y ago
This is exactly why I’ve more or less stopped using it. Twitter seems to have become not useful.
- Thlom 5y ago
  I only read Twitter through Tweetbot on my phone and have been doing so for like forever. I get a reversed chronological timeline, no ads and no recommendations. I hear people talk about how useless Twitter has become, but for me Twitter has been more or less the same since 2006.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

I feel like I'm the only person in the world who likes the "algorithmic" feed. In theory I follow few enough people to be able to sit down and read every tweet - I rarely want to. The magical "algorithm" seems to do a reasonable job of raising tweets with high activity, or tweets from people I often interact with, to the top. This seems entirely reasonable to me, and if I want to see the rest, I can just keep scrolling. Perhaps it is more of a problem if you follow hundreds of people. But I don't do that, and if I did, I'd never be able to read everything anyway.

jsnell 5y ago
The problem isn't with reordering the timeline. It's that the algorithmic timeline will insert all kinds of total garbage posted by people I don't follow into the timeline. The real timeline is easy to curate. Just follow people who post interesting things, then unfollow people who turn out to tweet too much about things you have no interest in. The algorithmic timeline makes that impossible.
- thrdbndndn 5y ago
  I actually like these recommendations. Then again I mainly use Twitter to look for arts, so it's less important that a tweet is posted by someone I follow or not.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I feel like I'm the only person in the world who likes the "algorithmic" feed. You're not alone. I've switched back and forth but the algorithm wins every time for me. For me, the biggest downside of the chronological feed is that it is dominated by people who Tweet the most, which is an obvious outcome of pure chronological ordering. The algorithmic feed seems to do a good job of showing me Tweets from people I've interacted with or whose Tweets I've liked. It's good at surfacing Tweets from people I follow who rarely Tweet while effectively rate-limiting the Tweets from the excessive Tweeters that I follow. This is a strange article because Twitter is still giving the chronological fans what they want. I have no doubt that chronological feed is a rarely used feature and in 2022 it's guaranteed that Twitter has analytics to back up this decision.

ajpkco 5y ago

They should have a separate tab for the two of them like YouTube has, I like being able to move quickly between the algorithmic recommended feed and the “subscribed to” one.

leodriesch 5y ago
This is exactly what this update brought, isn’t it? The app now has a tab bar on top with Home and Latest Tweets.

extr 5y ago

Part of the reason twitter is so great is that reading posts chronologically gives you a feeling of connection and immediacy in communication. I like reading posts from 5 seconds ago, conversations only yet halfway through, absolute bleeding edge breaking news, it's unique among social media platforms in this regard and that makes it feel very alive. But I don't get that from the algorithm, my timeline turns into more of a constantly rotating greatest hits reel of posts in my corner of the network graph. That's cool, ha ha very funny meme. But it doesn't feel "alive" then, it feels like FB/IG/Tiktok. Which kind of ruins the point of why I enjoy twitter in the first place.

nkozyra 5y ago

They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline for ... well, forever. As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more profitable. I buy this, intuitively, because it seems natural that it'd be harder to sneak in something jarring if you were viewing a more traditional timeline. But I can't fathom why seemingly no effort has gone into monetizing a chronological timeline. Why is it's foregone conclusion that it won't work with advertising the way the algorithmic was works?

flenserboy 5y ago
You're assuming that Twitter is a business that is run like a business and not something else.
KarlKemp 5y ago
None of those motivations seem to make much sense. I’d bet on simple negligence: only a tiny minority insists on the chronological timeline and it’s therefore acceptable to annoy them from time to time.
slimsag 5y ago
I don't think there's any issue monetizing a chronological timeline. The issue for them I imagine is retention: with chronological, it's likely that when you visit Twitter the first few messages you see are not interesting and you leave. But if they put a tweet that's popular among your social group in front of you? Odds are that's interesting to you and you stick around a bit longer. I dislike that, to be clear, but I imagine this is the human behavior for >90% of people.
- eatsyourtacos 5y ago
  Which is what pissed me off the most about TikTok for the brief period I used it. They would just show me random shit basically irregardless of date.. and that's not at all what I wanted. I found it to be an new source- of sorts. I'm not saying a good one, but at least it was somewhat interesting to may see peoples perspective on some topic. But what I found is it would just show me stuff that could be months old, days old etc instead of prioritizing like.. top day things. I haven't used it during the russia/ukraine time.. but I can't imagine how wildly inaccurate of a picture you would get if you are viewing stuff completely out of date order. Yeah they put the date on the video.. but that doesn't really help, everything is still all over the place. For all Reddit's faults- I can at least go there, take a look at some of the top headlines in some subreddits.. and know if I see something it's recent unless I am looking otherwise.

hirundo 5y ago

I feel like a smuggler. I closed my Twitter account due to such shenanigans, and now read my favorite tweeters via Nitter RSS feeds. None of the various Twitter bovine excrement comes along for the ride, just the words of the people I intend to follow, in the order posted. No ads, no trending topics, no shocking takes from a friend of a friend of a friend. And for me the read-only nature of this arrangement is a bonus feature. So it's probably just a matter of time before this route is plugged.

abnercoimbre 5y ago
What do you mean plugged? Twitter will find a way to shut down Nitter?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tim-- 5y ago
  It wouldn't be too hard. Nitter is using a few unofficial APIs from Twitter.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    As far as I know, Nitter reverse-engineers and uses the same API that their official web frontend uses. So while it can be made difficult and turned into a game of cat & mouse, it can't be "shut down" per se without also shutting down their own UI.

amatecha 5y ago

If you want "Twitter" without ads, algorithmic feed manipulated by marketing, actual moderation, and actual community, I suggest joining a Mastodon[0] instance (and you probably already know people who are on the platform, making it easier to choose which instance ;)). It's kinda like using Twitter in 2007, but with way more features. For example, selective permissions per-"toot" ("followers only", or "unlisted" which makes it not show up on the public timeline, but still visible on your profile or to followers), content warning on toots (like a spoiler warning), full image description support, much longer posts... Personally I'm closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon. Many in my social circle have already done so. Oh, while I'm at it: if you want to view Twitter posts without having a Twitter account (or just don't want to see ads and trending crap), check out Nitter[1]. Alternative front-end. It also has minimal JS and is far more resource-efficient (viewing my profile loaded 1.56mb of resources on Nitter, compared to 9.2mb on Twitter) [0] https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [1] https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/

YaBomm 5y ago
cpach 5y ago
“Personally I’m closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon.” I did this and I don’t regret it.
TeddyDD 5y ago
This. I'm still on Twitter for lol content, but I can dump it at any moment. Mastodon is great.
ptato 5y ago
I don't know anyone who uses Mastodon, and whenever I've tried it every instance seems barren. I would love to ditch Twitter though.
sdrinf 5y ago
Last year, I throw some significant amount of time, energy, and dev focus to get into this; on the basis that I _wanted_ Mastodon to be a successful thing. To be specific, I've first spent around 2 weeks for "searching"/browsing (there's no search, only tags :/ ), seeking out acquaintances, and looking for topics/servers that would tickle my curiosity/insight senses. There were none for me. So, given that mastodon is large, and federated, surely the problem is with me right? So, I said fuck it, let's break out the API. I wrote a scraper, seeded with a few least-bad people's profile, programmed it to pull the last ~32 toots & add all connections of the user to scrape breadth-first to get a wide array of perspectives. ~150 servers & 50,000 toots. I then took my general keyword list (~150 items, representing majority of my interests in both layman and technical terms) that I use to evaluate social networks, and search engines, and crunched through the toots. Results: deep technical terms have accidental hits, generally used either in different context; or scratching almost none of the surface. Wide terms generally pull very low signal, from the general vicinity of conspiracy theories/how bad twitter is/crypto/mastodon is great. I'd really really would prefer to actually use Mastodon, but 1, the features they offer optimizes against it's own usage (lack of search, lack of discoverability; you can call this positive change, but again, it optimizes against onboarding & finding interesting stuff) 2, because it's federated, there's no-one dedicated to acquiring people who have better use of their time, and 3, the people who are in there, do not, currently, would lead me to level up in directions I care about. Mastodon represents a set of preferences, and I'm happy for you that it seems to be aligning with yours; it does not aligns with mine, is all I'm saying.

scim-knox-twox 5y ago

I've stopped using Facebook since they messed up timeline several years ago (even manually selecting “Newest posts” started to do… nothing).

krater23 5y ago
I know what you mean. The algorithm killed Facebook for me.

jra101 5y ago

Thankful that Tweetdeck still works and has never tried to switch me to a non-chronological feed.

bmlzootown 5y ago

GoodTwitter2[0] is the only reason that I still use the web version anymore. I can handle the mobile interface on a mobile device, but making the desktop experience mobile-themed was the straw that almost broke the camel's back. GoodTwitter2 mostly fixes that, thankfully. The userscript also fixes the reverse-chronological issue. There's literally a setting that enables one to force "Latest Tweets First" mode, so it'll switch back to the "latest" feed whenever Twitter has decided that you should be viewing their "home" feed instead. [0] https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2 https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2

malwarebytess 5y ago
Do you know how to access GT2 settings? I can't seem to find it after installing the script and confirming it works.
- bmlzootown 5y ago
  It should be accessible from the normal settings. Click on your profile avatar, settings and privacy, GoodTwitter2.
  - malwarebytess 5y ago
    Yeah, it's blank for me unfortunately. I think I'm experiencing a bug like this one here: https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2/issues/33 https://github.com/Bl4Cc4t/GoodTwitter2/issues/33 i'll look into it
syl_sau 5y ago
May I suggest the FF extension Minimal Theme[0] by Thomas Wang, which simplifies the UI by removing those enormous blobs of texts everywhere and also by hiding the "trends" panel. Very good addition: it can also hide engagement counts (replies, RTs and likes), so you can scroll sanely without feeling obliged to like a stupid tweet just because it has 100 likes already. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimaltwitter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimaltwitte...

insin 5y ago

Tweak New Twitter [0] can automatically keep you on Latest Tweets and hide the new timeline tabs, even if Latest Tweets is "unpinned" [1] (as long as the implementation hasn't changed significantly since the last A/B test they did of timeline tabs on web) [0] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter [1] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/issues/78 https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/issues/78

_Microft 5y ago
I can recommend "Tweet New Twitter" too. It allows users fine-grained control of Twitter's features (algorithmic content, retweets, UI changes and more). The only small criticism that I have is that there is no button or keyboard shortcut to quickly disable it in the case that I actually need one of the disabled features). For that you can quickly bring up Firefox' addons dialog via Ctrl+Shift+A though, to disable the addon completely.

molach 5y ago

I use tweetbot tweetdeck and twidere

null_object 5y ago

I don’t care what they do so long as they don’t turn off API-access allowing the user to switch to much better alternatives free of their advertising, profiling, and spying crap

ifvictr 5y ago

I have a bookmark of their mobile web app on my phone’s home screen now. Works great as a replacement if you don’t mind losing features like push notifications and the ability to speak in Spaces! It also has the benefit of tweet drafts syncing from your other web browsers.

jwmoz 5y ago

I hate Twitter for all the change they've made-more spam and useless engagement features. I noticed this in testing some time ago, constantly making it hard just to see what I want, not the Algo suggested tweets, other peoples likes, spam etc. Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust. Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube on every video view, and I can't even speak Chinese.

fsflover 5y ago
Consider using Mastodon instead. It's the new Twitter which will never get bloated (because it's p2p and FLOSS).
alperakgun 5y ago
Twitter stream looks like MSN.com/Yahoo (News) frontpage. It's not social, it's full of suggestions I don't like.
fartcannon 5y ago
That sucks! You know, you don't have to see advertisements. And you don't have to log into google. You can subscribe to feeds with RSS.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  Twitter is (was?) for 1:1 discourse and updates, not consuming news or long form content. If you used Twitter like an RSS feed you were doing it wrong
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
joering2 5y ago
> Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube You are lucky! I obviously share IP at home with my children, but how is my 13 years old daughter getting disgusting commercials (all in Portuguese for some reason??) of "Manscape" products, women's "spray everywhere even there" deodorant, some soap where interracial couple does everything other than THAT under the shower... and few others jaw-droppers I honestly forgot by now. And tons and tons of crypto spam. I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore?? has to be some bot fishing for keywords and nude, if none, then approve.

ricardobeat 5y ago

They’ve made the decision to lay down the algorithm long ago. Mind you, I can absolutely see that activity on Twitter has only been going up recently. Which would be great if 80% of it wasn’t self-promotion, crypto babble and spam, plagiarized content, and LinkedIn style “expert” threads. On top of that, all of the promoted tweets I see are junk content farms. It hasn’t been an ideal place for connecting with friends for a while, and now it’s becoming an absolute shit hole for decent content or professional communities. What will be left?

zeepzeep 5y ago
You guys really need to get your twitter feed in order. You realize that they have an option to only show latest tweets of people you follow? Then it's just about unfollowing all crypto spammers and you're good. While my feed isn't free of undesired content, it's far better than any other platform I use, including HN (because the good bits from HN get shared on Twitter).
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  You are commenting on a post that is about Twitter removing the option to see latest tweets by default… Also, the chronological timeline is not ideal once you follow > 100 profiles. One of the issues at hand here is that they removed the “missed” section and replaced with the algorithmic feed. There is no way to catch up with only the most interesting tweets from people you follow, other than scrolling through all of it.
  - zeepzeep 5y ago
    I'm following over 100 and I do not have a hard time, just scroll up from where you left off last time > other than scrolling through all of it. What do you want? Do you want all latest tweets, or do you want AI to generate a list of good ones?
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      I guess it depends on how prolific your feed is. I don't have 40 minutes to review the entire timeline every day. AI is not inherently evil. Yes, I want to see the most relevant / controversial / liked tweets by people I follow. Most of that doesn't need any complex algorithm in the first place. What I don't want to see are bubble-inducing "recommended" tweets, or tweets liked by someone I follow (isn't that what retweets are for?), or "topics", or "people you should follow". If I wanted an AI-curated feed I'd just go to facebook or read the news.

WA 5y ago

1. Create list 2. Add people 3. Read as reverse chronological feed without ads.

vero2 5y ago
https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4 https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4

thiht 5y ago

The word thing is that the « Home » feed is soooo bad. Twitter switched me to the home feed without my knowledge and I was like « wtf this tweet is 2 months old + I’ve already liked it + it’s not even active »… I thought it was a cache issue

Tenoke 5y ago

They might make it harder to choose but props to Twitter for still having the chronological option and allowing access through alternative interfaces like Tweetdeck unlike say Facebook. Also props for letting you to just straight block in the normal way the account behind an ad you see.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nickdothutton 5y ago

Twitter is now deep into the “every new release makes the product worse” stage of life.

sph 5y ago
Reddit as well, though it seems to me Twitter tries harder to make itself hated to its power users. I reckon they've decided they've become so indispensable and irreplaceable they can do whatever they want to maximise profit.

fredsted 5y ago

I see a lot of posters saying they don't like the algo feed, but I prefer it. When I launch twitter, I really want to see what's going on, what I've missed and what the current popular posts are. I follow hundreds of accounts, and if I were to go through it all in rev chron order, it would take hours.

NGRhodes 5y ago
In theory I would like this feature for discovery, but the signal to noise ratio for me is terrible, I have tried to use it, blocking 20 topics and it's still a poor experience for me. I could well be an outlier for this feature.

blacklight 5y ago

Just use Twitter's lists. I've been using them for a long time. I added to one of my lists only the accounts that I really want to see on my feed (no old school friends, acquaintances, nor random people that some of the accounts I follow just started following: only sources with added value). The result? Open your list, and you'll see all the tweets sorted chronologically, only from the accounts you really care to follow. The quality of the time I spend on Twitter has dramatically increased since this change. No more time wasted scrolling through whatever irrelevant tweets the platform wants me to see. Twitter for me has basically become like an RSS feed aggregator with a curated list of sources to follow, reported in chronological order. And that's exactly what I wanted. Fck their algorithmic sht: I know better than them what I want to read.

LinAGKar 5y ago
Myself I hardly ever open the Twitter front page. I get all my Twitter follows in my RSS reader through RSS-bridge, and then it doesn't matter how Twitter sorts them.
- aceazzameen 5y ago
  This sounds like the way to go. I'll keep this plan in my back pocket if/when the chronological feeds disappear.
SECProto 5y ago
Caveat: I immediately block anyone who adds me to a list (it's only happened 3 or 4 times and it seems spammy). And I've seen a number of other accounts with "don't add me to lists" or equivalent in their bio.
- thrower123 5y ago
  There's a difference between private and public lists. As far as I'm aware, adding someone to a private list does not notify them that they've been added, it just give you a filter and the chronological view of tweets from people you add to the list.

lucumo 5y ago

Ffs. The availability of the chronological timeline is the only reason why Twitter still works for me and Facebook and LinkedIn don't. I keep seeing the same shit on the latter two, despite extensive attempts to train the recommender engine. Facebook just keeps showing me the same posts over and over again. LinkedIn shows different posts, but they are all so cookie cutter similar that they might as well have been the same. And even more insipid, it will do a repeat of network updates at two weeks and four weeks. Nothing says "we got interesting content" more than reruns! I'm soooo looking forward to Twitter being uninteresting repeats as well. > But when I force close and re-open the app when looking at the Latest Tweets column, the Home feed is what Twitter shows first. Great. Choose between keeping the app always-on or having boring shit first.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> LinkedIn shows different posts, but they are all so cookie cutter similar that they might as well have been the same. I fear the cookie-cutter similarity of business communications isn't something LinkedIn will be able to fix. Banality is a borderline essential component of business communications. I absolutely loathe LinkedIn; it's the social network I resent the most.
DavideNL 5y ago
> chronological timeline Just use one of the 3th party twitter clients… problem solved. I use “Aviary - for Twitter” on iOS which has no subscription, unlike Tweetbot.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

teekert 5y ago

I think FB stopping with the chronological feed was the point I dropped off (years ago). Every time I'd log in it was different and unpredictable and I couldn't find anything back anymore even though I knew I read something about a month ago. Idk, maybe the algo's order is better for most people, but it doesn't work for me. As for Twitter, I never got on that boat.

igravious 5y ago

I had no idea that clicking on the "sparkle" thingy allowed you to switch from algorithmic to reverse chronological order.

Ambolia 5y ago

Is there any easy way to follow a couple of Twitter accounts in chronological order without having a Twitter account? Nitter is nice to follow individual accounts, but you have to go to each account 1 by 1 rather than create a personal timeline with chronological posts from different accounts.

timbit42 5y ago
Use nitter.net and just use nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3
flas9sd 5y ago
I use fraidycat (browser addon) for this. You can import/export your follows as html/json/opml too if you want to move. While not necessary, a nitter instance also replaces twitter.com, primarily for the rendering speed. It's funny that alternative frontends became a thing
- Ambolia 5y ago
  Cool, it's available as an AUR package in Arch Linux too: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fraidycat-git https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fraidycat-git
vero2 5y ago
https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4 https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4
evilsetg 5y ago
The Fritter app has this capability, if I remember correctly.

lloeki 5y ago

Every time I get to use Twitter outside of Tweetbot I wonder how folks can use the damn thing and get any value out of it, and conversely stop wondering why people say to me "I tried Twitter but I could not understand anything". I guess there must be some (presumably big) audience that likes the algorithm, but for Twitter to derive value for me it must have this element of predictability that the mechanically chronological timeline and properly threaded conversations brings.

bgro 5y ago

I still haven’t figured out how to read twitter conversations / threads and profiles. Everything always seems out of order. Referenced things are just generally missing as well. I don’t think they were deleted but I have no idea.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
The fact that third-party "unroll" services are actually essential is what makes Twitter so laughable. It is, as it has always been, a banal protocol trying to dress up as an impressive product.
coffeecat 5y ago
I think this is a fundamental flaw in the platform. Shared context is the key to having productive conversations, and twitter is a massive decontextualization machine. Traditional forums allow messages to be disseminated widely to readers who potentially have no out-of-band context. But they have enough in-band context to enable productive conversations: (1) there's a thread title and an original post which everyone generally reads, (2) all messages in a thread are visible to everyone, and (3) longer messages are supported. Short messages of a sentence or two are insufficient to convey much information without context, but can be very useful with context: "Sure, 6 sounds good". SMS and messaging apps work fine because messages are displayed in the context of a conversation, and dissemination is limited to known recipients who generally have some out-of-band context. But twitter provides little or no in-band context, messages are too short to stand on their own without context, and messages are disseminated to a global user base which has no out-of-band context. You'd expect that to be a recipe for a dumpster fire.

dwighttk 5y ago

Seems like every year Twitter does something I’d hate during Lent. I wonder if their users drop off noticeably and they panic or if they know it is coming.

leodriesch 5y ago
I always imagine their user counts are quite low compared to other social media. Where I live I’m quite the outlier for using Twitter, very few people use it. Most that do work in tech. Is that different in other parts of the world? Is Twitter mainstream social media that almost everyone you know has?
- dwighttk 5y ago
  Almost everyone I know uses text/email as their social network. Probably hear most people talk about faceboook though. I know a few of the people I follow on Twitter but not many that live anywhere near me.
- krater23 5y ago
  I don't know anyone out of the tech bubble that uses Twitter. Most poeple don't know what it is.

mschuster91 5y ago

Jesus. They should go and fix elementary stuff like search first - try searching "from:@accountname keyword", and it will usually take five to ten attempts until you find that tweet from three years ago - before they introduce shit that the users don't fucking want.