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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 perso
by 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 agoI 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 agoAs 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.
- baq 5y agoi'd argue social networks only become evil if the want to grow revenue and earnings and more importantly keep growing them at some fixed rate y/y for too long (otherwise they get recategorized as value instead of growth and all the juicy multiples disappear from their stock grants...)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- addingnumbers 5y ago> Social networks are inherently evil, that's their business model What's evil about Mastodon, Matrix, Pleroma, diaspora, etc?
- oblio 5y agoThe fact that if they're good they're not adopted, I guess? I don't know anyone using any of those networks.
- rightbyte 5y agoWhen I joined FB there were no ads and a chronological feed and everything was awesome. Reddit was awesome. Nowadays they are an evil manipulation mess, but I don't think it is an inherit property of social networks.
- oblio 5y agoPhase 1: user acquisition. Phase 2: profit (through using and abusing their users). Both steps are written in stone in their business plan on day 1, you just don't know it. As a user you were still in phase 1. Similar story with image hosting websites. First they don't have ads and load fast and don't really have image restrictions. Then they start adding restrictions and ads.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
- gxs 5y agoDisagree here - you can insert things into a chronological timeline just fine - it's no more jarring than an algorithmic one. Nothing wrong with showing me, and clearly denoting, a tweet that I might like in between other tweets I browse. Don't understand this black and white thinking.