Joshua MarshallAt least until recently Twitter was the rare platform that allowed you to get close to a reverse chron feed. They didn’t make it easy but you could do it. It was things like that, lack of a killer instinct that kept it financially marginal. Though some of us know it from a tech perspective it is difficult to grasp the psychological impact of an algorithmic feed. It’s very literally meant to provoke, to agitate. A chronological feed doesn’t do that. That is a big part of the different experience.
jakelondon@joshtpm Wonder how many people actually went to the trouble of finding the Chron feed? I did and also filtered further using lists.
CarpInSanDiego@joshtpm when you are worried about monetization based on interactions you will make a algorithm to produce those interactions. Rage prints money.
Michele@joshtpm The difference is noticed instantaneously! Very pleasant experience thus far.
tgifisher@joshtpm This was the primary function of an app as Twitter stripped them of their flexibility by constantly providing more limitations on the API. You could still get tweets in chronological order without readjusting and you could strip out ads. It is much calmer. Day 3 or 4 into the Fediverse, seems like the same thing--better. Will everyone continue to be so nice? I am curious, but so far it is fun here.
Power-Mad Anarchist
MJ@joshtpm " It’s very literally meant to provoke, to agitate" I'm a little slow - it took me a long time to figure this out. I kept seeing super dumb tweets in my feed from people I didn't even follow being shown to me for the sole purpose of provoking an angry response. So I spent an inordinate amount of time crafting nasty witty replies to idiotic posts.
David Clingingsmith@joshtpm I’ve not thought about the system-level effects, only at a personal level. That’s very insightful
Dr. Fancypants, Esq.@joshtpm I came to Twitter when I nuked my Facebook account, where the algorithm was what I was trying to escape from. I appreciated that reverse chron was an option on Twitter, but I swear there were about a half-dozen resets to the algorithm before my preferred choice finally stuck.
christian holt@joshtpm Someone is always the main character of Twitter - there are no “slow news days” there. And the algorithm drives content engagement, so the reaction to the reaction to the thing of the day very quickly becomes the story.
I’m looking forward to seeing viral content not because the algorithm decided I should see something with 50k likes in an hour, but because someone I followed (for good reasons) thought it was good content. I’m looking forward to having slow news days.
Manong Dave@joshtpm The algorithm was designed to do that. It was designed to anger and upset people. Because angry, upset people are so much easier to manipulate. It's almost like those sci fi stories where they slip a drug into the water supply to make people mean and paranoid.
S★m V★rm★@joshtpm Man I never understood why more people didn’t use Tweetbot. I have never used Twitter any other way, and have never seen — literally never — a Twitter ad
Alan Thompson
James Buhler@joshtpm Tweetdeck gives the reverse chronological feed easily, across lists and individual accounts and without ads. Twitter has owned it for a long time and still allows it to operate ad free. I never understood that. It's like they forgot about it.
ProtectiveHen
carbone@joshtpm I stoped using Facebook because of that.
@carbone Yeah, i've been off facebook since roughly 2015.
LittleGravitasMy experience of using independent T apps (except to check follows and followings; and for polls, where they do not function) is that they avoid entirely the whole algorithmic feed thing. All you get, if you avoid the Home TL and use private lists, is a series of chronological feeds, in columns. Much more manageable, and considerably less psychological impact!
Nathan Rubin@joshtpm I’ve always used Twitter Lists. It’s the only way I’ve found that I enjoy using the app. It keeps everything chronological, I can add users by topic / user commonality (sports, politics, video games, etc). And then I can just switch topics and go to a different one if I don’t like the vibes on the list at that moment. If Twitter was like that by default it would vastly improve the platform IMO
Splitpane@joshtpm But the craziness of Twitter, up to a point, was part of its charm. There is a big spread between an algo that *maximizes* engagement and *no* algo. I wonder if there is room in between, under user control, to see more popular posts for example, but short of cramming the timeline with rage fodder.
@splitpane That's true. That's definitely true. But there are ways to do that without engineering it intentionally be addictive. But you're right about this. I mean, heroin is like that too. And cocaine.
@joshtpm Haha, yes. Well that's what I'm saying. There is a lot of room between herbal tea and crack. And if users can dial it up or down as opposed to a revenue-maximizing corporation, then maybe you can get a good balance in the cold brew to espresso range, to overextended the metaphor...
Helena Claire@joshtpm I figured out how to avoid Twitter’s algorithm.
But the fact that it existed and that so many used it by default made for a pretty toxic environment in the end.
It’s intended to keep the stress hormones flowing so that you can’t look away, and that changes how people respond to each other.
This is so much nicer because not only am I not exposed to that, but neither was anyone else that I encounter.
Dave Carlson@joshtpm I have been using the chron feed pretty much my entire time on twitter. Probably one reason why I didn't hate it.
Fred Miracle@joshtpm I've never been willing to let the algorithm choose what I see. I have always gone to look at specific twitter peeps I value for specific things at appropriate points in time. So for me, it really comes down to overcoming the network effects: getting more of the people who hit the sweet spot - between (a) agreeing with me a lot, but also (b) stretching my mind by being reliably smart, interesting and/or informative - to move over here...