Buzz AndersenOne thing I am always surprised at when people discuss Twitter/Mastodon clients is that there are apparently still so many people who attempt to consume every post in their timeline. I pretty much gave up any pretense of treating my timeline like an inbox years ago.
(Not an argument for algorithmic timelines at all BTW. I just don’t care that much about rock solid timeline position restoration because I don’t even pretend to follow everything that happens on here.)
jimray@buzz I learned to --love-- tolerate the algorithmic timeline at some point. My hope for mastodon is that I’ll be able to tweak the variables to some degree and end up with something that works a bit better. I don’t need much more optimization than the 2000s era Bayesian spam filters tbh.
@jimray My main problem with the Twitter algorithmic timeline is it felt like the focus on engagement as a signal meant that your feed was always dominated by the same, like, 10 journalists who post 500 times a day like deranged addicts, while meanwhile there is a vast long tail of normies whose occasional posts might as well not even exist.
@jimray It also basically meant that anyone who wasn’t habitually posting epic multi-message threads all the time basically disappeared.
Austin@powerllama @jimray Over on Mastodon, it is *not* time for some game theory!
@jimray Perhaps a more thoughtful algorithm might habitually say “Hey, here’s someone you haven’t seen in awhile! Guess what—they still exist!”
@buzz yeah, some combination of “I always want to see posts from my wife and my good pal Buzz (whom I miss and hope I get to see again soon)” and “this is probably actually interesting to you in a way that isn’t creepy”
YouTube actually does a good job of this, I’m hearing TikTok is similar. I suspect it’s somewhat easier since those are both built around surfacing interesting content, not building on top of social graphs.
Marc Hedlund@marcprecipice @jimray Yeah, that stuff was a huge mistake. Made Twitter feel like a panopticon.
Max
Kathryn Yu@buzz Weirdly, Facebook has this feature. Last time I checked it out, it wasn’t actually that compelling to me.
@jimray “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the feed.”
Mark Bramhill@mcbramhill @jimray Haha, yeah, it's like...hey maybe we could try using algorithms to create something other than perpetually self-reinforcing power laws?