@jon Mostly good points but I think you mischaracterize a lot of the complaints about twitter's features. Twitter, thankfully, has a chronological timeline because without that it would be absolutely unusable for me. But a lot of complaints come from people who *want* an algorithm. The problem is that twitter's algorithm, for whatever reason, results in feeds that are full of the worst posts you've ever seen. It feels like the algorithm is designed to keep people angry and logged in.
@jon further, making algorithms is hard. If a big company can't make an algorithm that doesn't make a substantial number of users mad (it would be incorrect to assume that everyone who prefers algorithm over reverse-chron has 0 complaints about the algorithm, for reasons you state), then what chance does a smaller open source project have? Now they are working on algorithms and I hope it's just a matter of incentive structure being different. Otherwise, we'll be stuck with something even worse.
@thomasjwebb @jon But an algorithm that’s designed to maximize engagement (necessary if the point is advertising, I think) is different from an algo designed to maximize enjoyment, isn’t it? So it’s not just a matter of twitter’s resources being greater—what they wanted to do is different.
FWIW I’m someone who loathes reverse-chronological timelines. Show me the stuff I’m most likely to want to see!
@wrigleyfield @thomasjwebb @jon@social.lot23.com “no algorithm” does seem to even the playing field in interesting ways. I have <10% follower count here compared to my Twitter account, and a run-of-the-mill cat pic toot got engagement that would be “best of the month” for one of my tweets 🙃
