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They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline for ... well, forever. As the common belief goes, the "algorithmic" one is more prof

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 but I can't imagine how wildly inaccurate of a picture you would get if you are viewing stuff completely out of date order.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.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  Hotels can try boosting user retention, as measured by minutes spent in the room, by hiding guests' belongings while they are away.
  - Pmop 5y ago
    This is funny but on a side note, isn't this exactly what some casinos and some malls/stores do? I once spent one hour in a duty free mall because it was like a maze and I couldn't find the exit.
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    That's pretty much the thinking behind layouts of malls and grocery stores. Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating. Malls try to balance enabling people to find what they are looking for, but also make sure they don't find it too easily so that people can wonder about and be exposed to as many stores as possible. If you enter the Dubai Mall from the metro, there's a big sign that points to the left and says "Food Court". You'd get to the food court much faster if you turn right.
    - raverbashing 5y ago
      I wonder how much of this is an urban legend There's a reason why refrigerated items are usually at the back: fridges usually face a wall. You can have a shelf at the back sometimes but that's not always possible Also, for those quick purchases you can always go to somewhere closer, a gas station, etc. In fact in Europe some places do have the quick purchases right in front of the store so you don't need to go around (Tesco as an example).
      - rrradical 5y ago
        Nah, I saw this on my last shopping trip to a mega grocery. Bought basically all the items on my list on the right side of the store (produce, other food stuffs) and then had to walk past a half dozen aisles filled with random crap (non food) to get eggs from the dairy section.
- ankit219 5y ago
  With reverse chronological timeline, it's harder to build a advertising profile. While it's important to know what tweets a user is interacting with, the personalization option can surface more things as "You might like", "You follow x, and he liked", "Interesting tweet on the topics you follow/might like" and so on. Whether or not you choose to interact with anyone or more of those is a signal, and helps with advertising (if advertising is a question of "What tweet/content you are likely to interact with?"). Other than brands, most twitter influencers, or would-be influencers end up spending money on twitter ads to gain followers. With a reverse chronological timeline, it's hard to surface those tweets from outside the network without a jarring experience. They also realize the power of defaults and hence they decided to take away the default option.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    I agree that's a possible reason. But I don't think it's specifically necessary for Twitter, especially the sort of power user who wants a chronological timeline. Whether or not they show topic data for a particular tweet, they generally have it. I only use the chronological timeline, and I cleared out the interests list a year or two back, but they have built up a profile of hundreds of interests for me. I suspect forcing the ranked timeline on people is all about a small portion of Twitter juicing their engagement metrics, with no grand cross-team strategy in play.
  - clhodapp 5y ago
    As a side-note: a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is when they start conflating liking and sharing by implementing the "You follow x, and he liked" feature that you described. Since this clearly violates the user's intention (if you wanted to share something, you would have shared it), this serves as a subtle but distinct signal that manipulating users has become more important than listening to them.
    - oblio 5y ago
      > a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is ... when they are created. Social networks are inherently evil, that's their business model: manipulate users into addiction and serve ads. How do non-evil social networks look like? They're forums, plain old forums. But you don't become an ultra trillionaire with PhpBB.
- askura 5y ago
  It's also because there's power in being able to influence when people see something. It's harder to spot when that occurs when your timeline isn't chronological.
kmeisthax 5y ago
With chronological timelines you either "run out" of content (because you've already refreshed like 15 times this hour and read everything the people you follow have said), or you get buried in content you don't want (because you're following people for hairdressing tips and they're all tweeting 20-page threads about why Putin is actually in the right somehow). Eventually you burn out and churn out. With algorithmic timelines the system is deliberately optimizing for "what keeps you on the site", even if it's not new or not something you follow. Hence, you stay on longer and view more ads. There's nothing about chrono that makes advertising less effective; algorithmic timelines just keep people on site and thus keep them as part of your ad inventory.
- vba616 5y ago
  I think seeing everything from people you know and seeing things in chronological order are separate. Just because you select the latter doesn't mean you get the former. Simple experiment: Go to Facebook and use ?sk=h_chr scroll until you "run out" of material, and then check to see if you actually saw all of the recent stuff from a particular friend.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  That is, not my experience with algorithmic at all... Algorithmic digs up days old posts I saw, commented and liked and slaps them at the front.. the new stuff, the stuff I'd want to see and interact with, just disappears. But then maybe that's my fault for curating my timeline to show creators and not influencers/talking heads...
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    That's the point - algorithmic artificially lengthens the time you need to actually see new posts by making you scroll through lots of old bullshit - and you guessed it - ads in between and never giving you a clear indicator of when you've all caught up. By contrast, chronological will by default give you the latest stuff (which in case of news is what you want, and might even remove the need for you to see earlier stuff) and makes it super clear to tell when you've reached the end of the new stuff.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline Or the simpler explanation is that the chronological timeline isn't actually the preferred setting, outside of a small but vocal minority. If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all? I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate. If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature. > 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. I don't follow this logic. There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Companies need to service the vocal minority. This isn't a factory at Ford, they are more than capable and resourced enough to deliver colors other than black.
- nkozyra 5y ago
  > If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all? If I recall correctly, this was the default. Then they introduced the semi curated algorithmic as a feature. Then replaced chronological and got a ton of backlash. They've been playing a game of capitulation and direction ever since. > There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently. The chronological timeline is your connected accounts + ads. The algorithmic timeline is the same but also some "suggestions." Ostensibly this makes it harder to immediately separate ad from, say, an account your friend follows.
- shortstuffsushi 5y ago
  You've mentioned it a couple times - their analytics may support that fewer users are using the chronological sort. I wonder if it's because they are frustrated and moving off to alternative viewing portals to get the feed experience they like.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> 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? Operant conditioning and intermittent reinforcement are why.
whiplash451 5y ago
A chronological timeline has benefits but will look very dull compared to a timeline where Twitter can put in front of you stuff that's related to recent news but that was posted a while ago. The key is to push topics in front of you, not the latest thing that was said.
- lolive 5y ago
  The question is: who chooses the topic? In Google, the default results of the search engine can be circumvented by adding keywords to force the search algorithm to follow your thoughts. In Twitter, well... You hope Twitter won't be evil. [Guess what? It eventually will]
colechristensen 5y ago
I would bet there’s a phenomenon at work here where you can addict almost everybody for a short time by doing X but long term a few become hardcore addicts and most become alienated. It’s hard to tell that your actions have changed the kind of user who is most engaged until your platform is destroyed and consists of users who barely pay attention and addicts that feed off of each other and not much else (Facebook). Metrics lie and optimizing for certain performance metrics ends up optimizing for exploiting human weaknesses which is actually somewhat uncommon in the population, which explains the process of optimizing your platform into irrelevance.
ifkngluvscience 5y ago
Why is it a foregone conclusion that it's about straightforward monetization, or even monetization at all? What if it's actually a way to hide specific topics or sentiments from the timeline? If the algorithm of what to show first is a black box, scales can be tipped just like Google does with search results. If it's a pure chronological timeline, you either have to be blatant in not displaying the tweets you want to suppress, or let people see them.
MrPatan 5y ago
If I control your inputs, I control your outputs.
jdrc 5y ago
But why? I use it more now
daniel-cussen 5y ago
The chronological timeline is an algorithmic timeline. It uses an algorithm, sorting, to display the best content. What they want to use instead is a different, inferior algorithm (for you, or you wouldn't hate it so much), but which is superior for them. That algorithm is not the only profitable algorithm, it is one of many, your preferred system is also algorithmic. This is just an algorithm that uses a black box nobody understands, or even tries to understand, or even tries to read (which they could, they have access to the weights of the neural net), and consequently, which they can claim to have no responsibility or even power over. They're actually more heuristics, not algorithms. As such, they have all kinds of failures, many intentional. Algorithms (at least in my book) are generally are air-tight, and verifiable. Like you chronological feed, if two items were out of order, you could see it and it would show the algorithm to be wrong. It would have to lie about the date (which you do see sometimes) to fool you. These heuristics are really just the man behind the curtain, imposing his will in an algorithmically-amplified way. It is driven by a dual goal of profit and political ambitions, with the latter being weighted more highly.

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.
anonymoushn 5y ago
Hotels can try boosting user retention, as measured by minutes spent in the room, by hiding guests' belongings while they are away.
- Pmop 5y ago
  This is funny but on a side note, isn't this exactly what some casinos and some malls/stores do? I once spent one hour in a duty free mall because it was like a maze and I couldn't find the exit.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  That's pretty much the thinking behind layouts of malls and grocery stores. Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating. Malls try to balance enabling people to find what they are looking for, but also make sure they don't find it too easily so that people can wonder about and be exposed to as many stores as possible. If you enter the Dubai Mall from the metro, there's a big sign that points to the left and says "Food Court". You'd get to the food court much faster if you turn right.
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    I wonder how much of this is an urban legend There's a reason why refrigerated items are usually at the back: fridges usually face a wall. You can have a shelf at the back sometimes but that's not always possible Also, for those quick purchases you can always go to somewhere closer, a gas station, etc. In fact in Europe some places do have the quick purchases right in front of the store so you don't need to go around (Tesco as an example).
    - rrradical 5y ago
      Nah, I saw this on my last shopping trip to a mega grocery. Bought basically all the items on my list on the right side of the store (produce, other food stuffs) and then had to walk past a half dozen aisles filled with random crap (non food) to get eggs from the dairy section.
ankit219 5y ago
With reverse chronological timeline, it's harder to build a advertising profile. While it's important to know what tweets a user is interacting with, the personalization option can surface more things as "You might like", "You follow x, and he liked", "Interesting tweet on the topics you follow/might like" and so on. Whether or not you choose to interact with anyone or more of those is a signal, and helps with advertising (if advertising is a question of "What tweet/content you are likely to interact with?"). Other than brands, most twitter influencers, or would-be influencers end up spending money on twitter ads to gain followers. With a reverse chronological timeline, it's hard to surface those tweets from outside the network without a jarring experience. They also realize the power of defaults and hence they decided to take away the default option.
- wpietri 5y ago
  I agree that's a possible reason. But I don't think it's specifically necessary for Twitter, especially the sort of power user who wants a chronological timeline. Whether or not they show topic data for a particular tweet, they generally have it. I only use the chronological timeline, and I cleared out the interests list a year or two back, but they have built up a profile of hundreds of interests for me. I suspect forcing the ranked timeline on people is all about a small portion of Twitter juicing their engagement metrics, with no grand cross-team strategy in play.
- clhodapp 5y ago
  As a side-note: a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is when they start conflating liking and sharing by implementing the "You follow x, and he liked" feature that you described. Since this clearly violates the user's intention (if you wanted to share something, you would have shared it), this serves as a subtle but distinct signal that manipulating users has become more important than listening to them.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is ... when they are created. Social networks are inherently evil, that's their business model: manipulate users into addiction and serve ads. How do non-evil social networks look like? They're forums, plain old forums. But you don't become an ultra trillionaire with PhpBB.
askura 5y ago
It's also because there's power in being able to influence when people see something. It's harder to spot when that occurs when your timeline isn't chronological.

kmeisthax 5y ago

With chronological timelines you either "run out" of content (because you've already refreshed like 15 times this hour and read everything the people you follow have said), or you get buried in content you don't want (because you're following people for hairdressing tips and they're all tweeting 20-page threads about why Putin is actually in the right somehow). Eventually you burn out and churn out. With algorithmic timelines the system is deliberately optimizing for "what keeps you on the site", even if it's not new or not something you follow. Hence, you stay on longer and view more ads. There's nothing about chrono that makes advertising less effective; algorithmic timelines just keep people on site and thus keep them as part of your ad inventory.

vba616 5y ago
I think seeing everything from people you know and seeing things in chronological order are separate. Just because you select the latter doesn't mean you get the former. Simple experiment: Go to Facebook and use ?sk=h_chr scroll until you "run out" of material, and then check to see if you actually saw all of the recent stuff from a particular friend.
tehbeard 5y ago
That is, not my experience with algorithmic at all... Algorithmic digs up days old posts I saw, commented and liked and slaps them at the front.. the new stuff, the stuff I'd want to see and interact with, just disappears. But then maybe that's my fault for curating my timeline to show creators and not influencers/talking heads...
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  That's the point - algorithmic artificially lengthens the time you need to actually see new posts by making you scroll through lots of old bullshit - and you guessed it - ads in between and never giving you a clear indicator of when you've all caught up. By contrast, chronological will by default give you the latest stuff (which in case of news is what you want, and might even remove the need for you to see earlier stuff) and makes it super clear to tell when you've reached the end of the new stuff.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> They've been battling the widespread preference for chronological timeline Or the simpler explanation is that the chronological timeline isn't actually the preferred setting, outside of a small but vocal minority. If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all? I think the more obvious explanation is that very few people were actually using it according to their analytics, so the switch no longer occupies prime UI/UX real estate. If it was some sort of conspiracy, they would have just killed the feature. > 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. I don't follow this logic. There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently.

tomc1985 5y ago
Companies need to service the vocal minority. This isn't a factory at Ford, they are more than capable and resourced enough to deliver colors other than black.
nkozyra 5y ago
> If the chronological timeline is somehow hurting their profitability, why would they offer it at all? If I recall correctly, this was the default. Then they introduced the semi curated algorithmic as a feature. Then replaced chronological and got a ton of backlash. They've been playing a game of capitulation and direction ever since. > There's nothing stopping Twitter from inserting the same ads at the same frequency just because the Tweets are ordered differently. The chronological timeline is your connected accounts + ads. The algorithmic timeline is the same but also some "suggestions." Ostensibly this makes it harder to immediately separate ad from, say, an account your friend follows.
shortstuffsushi 5y ago
You've mentioned it a couple times - their analytics may support that fewer users are using the chronological sort. I wonder if it's because they are frustrated and moving off to alternative viewing portals to get the feed experience they like.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> 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? Operant conditioning and intermittent reinforcement are why.

whiplash451 5y ago

A chronological timeline has benefits but will look very dull compared to a timeline where Twitter can put in front of you stuff that's related to recent news but that was posted a while ago. The key is to push topics in front of you, not the latest thing that was said.

lolive 5y ago
The question is: who chooses the topic? In Google, the default results of the search engine can be circumvented by adding keywords to force the search algorithm to follow your thoughts. In Twitter, well... You hope Twitter won't be evil. [Guess what? It eventually will]

colechristensen 5y ago

I would bet there’s a phenomenon at work here where you can addict almost everybody for a short time by doing X but long term a few become hardcore addicts and most become alienated. It’s hard to tell that your actions have changed the kind of user who is most engaged until your platform is destroyed and consists of users who barely pay attention and addicts that feed off of each other and not much else (Facebook). Metrics lie and optimizing for certain performance metrics ends up optimizing for exploiting human weaknesses which is actually somewhat uncommon in the population, which explains the process of optimizing your platform into irrelevance.

ifkngluvscience 5y ago

Why is it a foregone conclusion that it's about straightforward monetization, or even monetization at all? What if it's actually a way to hide specific topics or sentiments from the timeline? If the algorithm of what to show first is a black box, scales can be tipped just like Google does with search results. If it's a pure chronological timeline, you either have to be blatant in not displaying the tweets you want to suppress, or let people see them.

MrPatan 5y ago

If I control your inputs, I control your outputs.

jdrc 5y ago

But why? I use it more now

daniel-cussen 5y ago

The chronological timeline is an algorithmic timeline. It uses an algorithm, sorting, to display the best content. What they want to use instead is a different, inferior algorithm (for you, or you wouldn't hate it so much), but which is superior for them. That algorithm is not the only profitable algorithm, it is one of many, your preferred system is also algorithmic. This is just an algorithm that uses a black box nobody understands, or even tries to understand, or even tries to read (which they could, they have access to the weights of the neural net), and consequently, which they can claim to have no responsibility or even power over. They're actually more heuristics, not algorithms. As such, they have all kinds of failures, many intentional. Algorithms (at least in my book) are generally are air-tight, and verifiable. Like you chronological feed, if two items were out of order, you could see it and it would show the algorithm to be wrong. It would have to lie about the date (which you do see sometimes) to fool you. These heuristics are really just the man behind the curtain, imposing his will in an algorithmically-amplified way. It is driven by a dual goal of profit and political ambitions, with the latter being weighted more highly.